<![CDATA[David’s Lists 2.0]]>https://longd.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tSb7!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6bdf7cb-bb48-4e25-9990-5d652cfdfadb_827x827.pngDavid’s Lists 2.0https://longd.substack.comSubstackMon, 15 Jun 2026 16:06:43 GMT<![CDATA[Reading Projects Omnibus]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-omnibushttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-omnibusMon, 15 Jun 2026 13:03:53 GMT

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Note from the Flight Deck:

1.

There’s a button on the Home Page menu that takes you to the Reading Project archive, but today I thought I’d sort them into piles (and work in some not originally labeled Reading Projects).

The deeper reason for today’s post:

Substacks are good at expressing day-to-day thoughts. Posts often read like entries in a journal or commonplace book. Some are pithy/fragmentary, others akin to brief essays or op-eds (or wonderfully profane screeds in the case of Jeff Tiedrich’s everyone is entitled to my opinion). Some favor information, some personal reflection. Some (like Roxane Gay’s weekly Audacious Roundup or Oldster Magazine’s Link Roundups) have curated lists of this and that—readings, events, links, other Substacks.1

DL 2.0 aims to be less of-the-moment and more of a continuing resource. I like to picture new subscribers poking about in the archive, and the rest of you easily finding and returning to earlier posts, or scrolling back to ones you skipped.

In short, this Substack is my personal stand against oblivion. As I say often, you pay me back by giving the posts your attention.

2.

Two other developments, one personal (“stand against oblivion” category), one Substactical.

The personal: Now have a Wiki page, joining the merry band of other David Longs, the mandolin player, the linebacker, the cornerback, the New Zealand composer, the Indiana state senator, the British distance runner, and David Ryan Long, also a writer (not to mention the deceased American murderer, David Martin Long).

The Substactical: We now have 503 subscribers (plus unknown # of followers), a new high. Question: Is telling you this sufficient to send us plummeting back to the 480s, as happened when I said we’d hit 501 some months back? It was the whiff of pride in my voice, wasn’t it? I knew it! Will I never learn??

3.

Finally, a reprise of The Birth Year Project invite follows at the bottom of today’s post.

Breakdown/Taxonomy of Reading Projects:

By Place:

By Genre:

By Topic:

By Presses:

By Era:

About You as a Reader:

By Prize:

[You supply the caption]

Birth Year Project:

Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve picked off 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census of years done: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.
See you in a couple of weeks.

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1

Other Substacks: Every so often, check out the recommended Substacks list every site has. Also, weed out your subscriptions—unsubscribe to ones you routinely skip. When I get a follower, I’m asked to “follow back”—I usually do not, which seems cold-hearted, I know, but I think we over-follow, which means: a) we read only a fraction of what hits our in-box, b) if 40-some percent of your subscribers open a given post that’s considered a success, but this can lead to, c) uncharitable thoughts welling up in a Substacker’s psyche. My basic advice: Keep checking out fresh Substacks, but don’t let your lists ossify and become useless.

]]><![CDATA[Reading Projects [28]: Scotland]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-28-scotlandhttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-28-scotlandMon, 01 Jun 2026 17:40:14 GMT

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Started O Caledonia (1991), by Elspeth Barker (b. Edinburgh, 1940)1 —her only novel. A day later, saw it named among the “duds” a Substacker listed (she was rating the 70 books she read for her MFA). Others in the dud pile: Ottessa Moshfegh, Lorrie Moore, Daphne du Maurier, Clarice Lispector, and Miriam Toews’ novel, All My Puny Sorrows (in my Hall of Fame). I left a note (unreplied to, natch), not arguing about her views (a fool’s errand), instead bringing up the question: What does it mean when you don’t like what so many other serious readers do? If you’re a grab-something-to-read-on-the-plane kind of reader, fine, no problem. But if you’re a practitioner of writing yourself, that’s not enough. You need to ask why. Maybe your reactions are partly extra-literary? Maybe your radical sensibility is white hot, and you’re all fuck this bougie crap! On the other hand, maybe some of your receptors are plugged, and you’re not hearing the full broadcast—you’re skimming across the top of the stuff others consider sublime.2

Anyway, Scotland.

As it happens, I contain a few wee strands of Scots DNA myself [third great-grandmother, Wilmena Waddle, b. 1813, Roxburghshire—in the Borderlands]. I’ve always favored the northern edge of things—granite, sweaters, moody sky. And though my wife has lately termed me a homebody, I did actually spend a month at Hawthornden Castle, a writer’s retreat outside Edinburgh in the early aughts.

So, below, a sampler of Scottish writing and a challenge. I’ve read maybe a third of them [*]—faithful readers of this Substack will recognize James Kelman’s novel, How Late It Was, How Late and a few others.

If you don’t do Spotify, this may not play (I hope I’m wrong). Lately, I’ve collected music I’d call NeoScotlandTrad—familiar-ish instrumentation and tunes, but infused with bass and drums and new ideas—think Dropkick Murphys with less in-your-face-ness.
Here’s a link to a playlist:

1.

19th Century Classics:

1900s:

2000s:

Speculative/Sci-fi:

Thrillers/Crime/Mysteries/Horror:

2. The Reading Project/Challenge:

This is where I pretend you’re looking for a “reading project” or “challenge” and you pretend you’ll take me up on it [or any of its thirty-odd siblings—list linked on home page menu bar], and thank me heartily for the deep dive.

OK, got that out of the way.

The rules:

Over the net six months, read (at least) six books from today’s post. As follows:

  • One from the Classics

  • One from the 1900s

  • One from the 2000s

  • One Speculative

  • One Crime/Mystery/Horror

  • At least one more.

[Feel free to substitute a different book by the same author.]

Extra Credit: In 1977, Northwest poet, Richard Hugo (one of my long ago mentors at the University of Montana), spent half a year living on the Isle of Skye, and in 1980 published The Right Madness on Skye (nominated for the Pulitzer in poetry).

Read it.

3. Selected Works by the Same Writers

William Boyd:

  • An Ice-Cream War (1982)

James Kelman:

A. L. Kennedy:

  • Day, (2007)

  • Paradise (2004)

Sir Walter Scott:

  • *Ivanhoe (1819)

  • The Heart of Midlothian (1818)10

  • Rob Roy (1817)

  • *Guy Mannering (1815)

Ali Smith:

  • The Seasonal Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer: (2016–2020)

  • *Hotel World (2001):

Muriel Spark:

R. L. Stevenson:

Douglas Stuart:

Irvine Welsh:

  • Porno (2002)

  • Glue (2001)

4.

  • https://thescottian.wordpress.com/2024/06/20/ranking-the-waverley-novels/

  • https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-36940688

  • https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest/fiction/books/written-by/scottish/authors/since/1900

  • https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/seven-scottish-classics

  • https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/articles/25-memorable-scottish-novels-for-adults-from-the-past-25-years

  • https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/scottish-booker-prize-nominees

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_literature_in_the_nineteenth_century

  • https://fivebooks.com/best-books/landmark-scottish-literature-james-robertson/#book-67553

  • https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-lists/14-page-turning-scottish-sci-fi-fantasy-and-horror-books

  • https://booksfromscotland.com/

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1

Elspeth Barker: She was married to the poet George Barker, quite a bit older, who had a long-term affair with poet Elizabeth Smart, who wrote about it in the cult classic, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945). Do yourselves a favor and read about the three of them.

[Oh, and while you’re at it, check out the Robert Lowell/Elizabeth Hardwick/Caroline Blackwood triad. Whoo.]

2

Sublime: This same week I read a post that called Gatsby “so bo-ring!”

3

Kelman: Also mentioned this in Sixes [5].

4

Torrington: Glasgow, the 60s, factory. From Booklist:

  • "The standard of Torrington's writing is so high that for once one is not ashamed to compare an unknown novelist to authors who are justly famous. That wag Joyce is the truest neighbor, though contemporaries Pynchon and Rushdie will do in a pinch: like all three, Torrington has a beautifully barbed wit and a fabulous ear for language, enough to send the sentences tumbling over one another in a symphony of belly laughs and brays or, where things are bleaker and more sarcastic, in a sort of muffled thudding like the dropping of shoes. . . . Writers this good, writing in the English language, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand."

5

Nan Shepherd: This was written in the 40s, only published thirty years later. It’s considered the last volume of The Grampian Quartet. The others are fiction:

  • The Quarry Wood (1928)

  • The Weatherhouse (1930)

  • A Pass in the Grampians (1933)

6

Sunset Song: First novel in trilogy, A Scots Quair.

7

Atkinson: English by birth, but went to uni in Scotland and lives in Edinburgh. She’s written “straight novels” but the ones listed here represent her speculative side—Life After Life and its companion novel, A God in Ruins (2015)—and her crime fiction—Case Histories introduces her Edinburgh detective, Jackson Brodie (to date there are six Brodie novels).

8

Cleeves: As you likely know, two of her police procedural series became classics in British crime TV: Vera (with the incomparable Brenda Blethyn), set in the Northumberland area of England, and Shetland (set in the Shetland Archipelago). FYI: the Orkneys are the ones closest to the northern tip of Scotland, the Shetlands the farther-out ones. The Shetland police in the show are based in the small city of Lerwick. I assiduously practiced saying the name the way detective Jimmy Perez does: Lih-tick. I still love saying it. Lih-tick, Lih-tick.

Raven Black is the first of the Shetland series.

9

Rankin: First of the Inspector John Rebus novels.

10

Heart of Midlothian: a) “Midlothian” is the region of the lowlands around Edinburgh. b) Scotland’s two major cities each have a “Catholic” team and a “Protestant” team [they play in the Scottish Premiership], thus: Glasgow has Celtic and Rangers, Edinburgh has Hibernians (aka Hibs) and the Heart of Midlothian (aka Hearts). Celtic (pronounced Sel-tic, like the Boston Celtics) and the Hibs were founded by Scotland’s many Irish emigrés—if you see Celtic out of context you’d swear they were an Irish team. c) I attended a Hearts/Celtic match in Edinburgh that went into stoppage time 1-1; seconds before the final whistle a Hearts player hooked a long shot into the net; everyone (including me) streamed out of Tynecastle Park ecstatically gobsmacked.

11

The Girls of Slender Means: Stark wrote a bunch of short novels; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the one most-often touted, but they’re all good. I like this one, about a rooming house for working women (there’s a bit of sardonic/black humor at the end). When you go looking for which Spark novel people recommend, you find people picking a dozen different titles.

]]><![CDATA[2026 (so far): ]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/2026-so-farhttps://longd.substack.com/p/2026-so-farMon, 18 May 2026 17:10:04 GMT
[Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images]

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Whoever you are, you’re my community. Talking to you about books every two weeks makes me feel useful, outward-looking, engaged. David’s Lists 2.0 is free—you pay me with your attention.

ay, there’s the rub . . .

Too often I feel like I’m beaming messages into deep space.
Substack is obsessively stat-conscious, so I know how many subscribers/followers we have, and how many open a given post, which turns out to be about 44%—a fellow Substacker told me this is about the norm. And I get it—I don’t open some of the Substacks I subscribe to either. Not in the mood, don’t have the time, etc. This is one reason I’m very selective in what I follow.
But when I feel like responding, I do. The other day, Heidi Pitlor wrote an important post about AI and voice; I told her it was brilliant. Then I left a chunky comment on what she’d said. Why? Because (aside from being a late-septuagenarian gasbag) I see Substack as my third-space, a place to converse with people of my tribe (and other tribes).
[More on stats.1 I (double dog) dare you to click on it.]
“I promise not to waste your time.”

1.

Five Best Reads of 2026 (so far):

About those five:

More then half the books I’ve logged this year have been speculative, but I Who Have Never Known Men is the only example on this first list. I’ll say a little more about it in another one below.

Seascraper is a quick, quite satisfying read. I like how the Guardian’s review begins:

  • You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper . . .

Its hero, Thomas Flett, is a shanker—at low tide, he and his horse ply the trade inherited from his grandfather, seining shrimp along the shoreline. As he con-templates his future, wondering whether he’ll stay in his village or try the greater world, and whether he’ll have enough gumption to perform at a local open-mic, the proverbial stranger rides into town. I’m calling this story realism though there’s an interlude deftly woven into it that strays (I won’t spoil it for you).

Brawler: I linked you to earlier comments on Groff in the notes. I read the first story in this collection, “The Wind,” in The New Yorker and immediately wrote her a fan letter. Only then did I start in on her novels. Brawler is really solid collection—precise, humane, acutely tuned into the evidence of human dilemmas, a book with no “filler stories.”

Crux is Gabriel Tallent’s second novel. I started reading for two reasons: a) My older boy had a copy of the first one, My Absolute Darling (2017)—Pamela Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “Reading this book is like watching an electrical storm.” For a couple of days nobody could find me. And b) I read the opening pages online and the voicey dialog snagged me—I knew I wanted to spend time with these two teenage outsiders bonded (platonically) by their passion for rock-climbing. A few reviewers gripe about its moments of melodrama. I won’t argue with them, only say that when a book has you, your receptors for emotion light up in a way that back-burners your analytical mind. A more cerebral writer might have shied away from the high drama toward the novel‘s end, to which I say: OK, fine, I like sophisticated, idea-rich novels, but this isn’t one of those. Tallent’s a writer—like Atticus Lish or Ottessa Moshfegh—whose first two novels inclined me to read whatever else they write. [One other thought about Crux.4]

Paradise Bronx: Ian Frazier (known as Sandy) is a foremost writer of book-length nonfiction, the kind fostered by generations of New Yorker writers, from E.B. White, Berton Rouché, Joseph Mitchell, and John McPhee to Susan Orlean, Rachel Aviv, Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kathryn Schulz, and so many others. Casual but precise, suffused with detail you didn’t realize was important until you read it, fastidiously fact-checked, and fun to read. Like Great Plains (1989) and Travels in Siberia (2010), the Bronx book is both participatory and deeply place-centric. He walks us through the borough’s 42 sq. mi. of terrain (including non-spaces nobody else would bother with) with acute attention to its layers of time. He stands on a spot and refreshes our memory of the history he laid out earlier—before it was this, it was this, and this . . . He makes information visceral. I get the same frisson as when on Time Team (my favorite archaeology show), they peel back a metre of English hayfield and there’s a Roman mosaic. But the topmost layers of history aren’t shirked, either—he makes a detailed case for the Bronx being the birthplace of hip hop. And so on. Sandy is always a great companion.

2.

Plague-Lit:

. . . is nothing new. Besides Boccaccio’s, The Decameron (c. 1353), Defoe’s, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Camus’s homage to it, The Plague (1947), AI happily supplies a few others.5

These days, there’s an onslaught of dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, and whereas the “end-times” scenarios in classic, mid-century sci-fi were typically the result of nuclear devastation (or, occasionally, overpopulation6), now the cause is, overwhelm-ingly, climate change—drowned cities, food-chain collapse, displaced populations, unstoppable epidemics, etc.—leading to the gusher of cli-fi titles, the subject of my last post (which updated an earlier one). Between them you’ll find about fifty novels.

If I were less graphically challenged I’d draw you a Venn diagram of how post-apoc fiction overlaps with cli-fi and plague-lit. They’re at least first cousins. Stories about inexorably rising seas have in common their central fact/image, sea-rise. What’s remarkable is how many unique iterations of this we have. Stories about epidemics have the same intrinsic problem—how to do it freshly.7

I haven’t taken a deep enough dive into “new kinds of plague”—I’m sure it’s a burgeoning category—but here are two I read this year:

Trías is Uruguayan. Read the publisher’s page about Pink Slime and you’ll get a good sense of the book. The plague is environmental, and therefore the novel is kin to other cli-fi/epidemic stories, yet there’s an existential undertone throughout that feels new.

The plague in Wanderers is a trance-like state that afflicts certain individuals, including the sister of a main character. They start walking, joining others in an undivertable stream. They don’t eat, don’t talk, don’t sleep. Question: where are they going (and why)?

NPR’s reviewer concludes his commentary:

  • This story is uncomfortable to read, but also a timely novel that demands a place in the spotlight. Wendig takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blended them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels while doing so.

Five Plague Lit Lists:

3.

Last Woman on Earth:

Not sure if this qualifies as a new room in post-apocalyptica’s mansion, but these three books belong together. Harpman’s novel has gotten a lot of ink since Transit Books brought out a new edition in 2022, which is heartening to see. Click on the link and you’ll find a brief synopsis.

The Wall . . . read the note about I Who Have Never Known Men (#8) then come back here. The Wall’s character is older as the book begins, about forty, and not in the dire situation as Harpman’s narrator—she’s on a weekend getaway with her husband in the Austrian mountains. But overnight she finds herself alone, on one side of an impenetrable-but-invisible barrier. Like Harpman’s narrator, she must find a way to keep living—physically and psychologically—without receiving any explanation for what’s befallen her. And like I Who Have Never Known Men, The Wall doesn’t stop with this collision between not-knowing and wanting to remain alive, the way it might if it were a short story, but the scenario is allowed to play out over years.

Here’s what (Nobel Prize winner) Doris Lessing has said about The Wall:

The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making a keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy. It is as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe. [Wiki]

4.

Two Novels I’m Reading Now (and will talk about in a future post):

  • What We Can Know, Ian McEwan (2025).

A few posts ago, we looked at Rachel Kadish’s, The Weight of Ink [Novels About Old Books]. McEwan’s novel is a mash-up of that plot—manuscript/two time frames—and a cli-fi/post-apocalyptic world plot. McEwan is one of our major, much-decorated novelists; he’s published some lesser novels along the way but What We Can Know isn’t one of them.10

  • On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), Solvej Balle (2020) [Trans. from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, 2024].

The first of a projected seven-volume series; shortlisted for 2025 International Booker. Like Groundhog Day—woman relives a day, November 18th, over and over and over—except here it’s not played for laughs (no waking to Sonny & Cher). Balle is getting raves for this project; I’m eager to get into Book II.

5.

Birth Year Project:

Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve picked off 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census of years done: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.
That’s it for today. Good reading to you. See you again in two weeks.

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1
Stats:
“Open rate” for Cli-Fi [2] was 43.83%.
There were 44 links in the post:
7% of openers clicked a link/individual links clicked by 1% of openers
Comment rate: half of 1%
“Like” rate: 2%

Questions:

  • Is it that giving concentrated attention to anything is too hard these days?

  • Is it that you’re reading this on your phone and your phone’s only good for bite-sized things?

  • Is it that the cornucopic nature of the delivery system makes us too impatient to follow-up anything—for instance, links in a post?

  • Is it that my concept—that we’re having a conversation about books—simply erroneous?

  • Am I simply dinosauric?

2

Groff: A couple notes on her from earlier posts, here (note 1) and here (note 13).

A common pattern: writer starts out writing short stories, publisher agrees to publish collection if writer follows it with a novel, after which writer continues writing novels and stops being a short story writer (or, alternatively, finds novel-writing torturous and goes back to writing stories). Lauren Groff has become both a major American novelist and a first-tier short story writer.

3

Frazier: Last summer I read and loved his equally chunky, discursive history of own kin, Family (1994).

I’ll add, what many of you already know, that Sandy has a second hat he puts on, the funny guy hat—he does “Shouts & Murmurs: pieces for the New Yorker every so often. One collection of these is Coyote v. Acme (1996)—the title piece being . . . well, you can guess. He also inherited Roger Angell’s role as composer of the annual name-naming Holiday Letter, doggerel raised to fine art.

4

Crux: Remember in school where they told you to avoid jargon? When I got to be a grown-up writer I realized they meant you shouldn’t conceal ideas behind technical smokescreens/euphemisms/etc., or demand a reader’s respect by showing off your insider-ness, or simply baffle people by using terms that they don’t know. In my note on Ian Frazier I mention New Yorker nonfiction—proffering undigested jargon is one thing New Yorker writer specifically do not do.

However: I eventually realized that jargon’s a great tool when managed correctly. What do I mean? Jargon is insider language. People at the heart of an enterprise talk about it in a certain way. Sometimes your characters operate within areas of expertise your readers don’t already know about—this often happens when writing about work, workplaces, science, specialized hobbies or sports and the like. Authenticity requires the specialized language. Some degree of reader bafflement is OK if it makes people believe you know what you’re talking about. Readers don’t need every single term explained; sometimes it’s enough to know that the characters know what’s what. [This is why I never mind snatches of untranslated foreign language in a text, as in Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy.] Anyway, the kind of rock-climbing done in Tallent‘s novel is rife with slang/jargon—much of it in dialog. I didn’t get all of it, but it helped cement my confidence in the story.

5

A few others:

  • Arthur Mervyn, Charles Brockden Brown (1799)—follows a young man in Philadelphia during a yellow fever epidemic.

  • The Last Man, Mary Shelley (1826)—pioneering apocalyptic novel about a future plague destroying humanity.

  • The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe (1842)—gothic short story regarding a plague in a secluded kingdom.

  • The Scarlet Plague, Jack London (1912)—post-apocalyptic story about a disease wiping out civilization.

6

Overpopulation: John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar (1968) and John Hershey’s, My Petition for More Space (1974) for starters. Then go here.

7

. . . freshly: Sometimes this quest takes you into meta territory. For instance, The Raw Shark Texts [Steven Hall, 2007], is a next-generation guy-on-the-lam story, in which our hero is being chased by “information sharks” and must hide in the spaces between things.

8

Harpman: Had a convo with my older son last night, re: this book vis-à-vis another speculative novel, In Ascension, Martin MacInnes (2023). He was saying (and I agreed) that he liked MacInnes’s story but not how it ended—that is, leaving key elements unresolved/unexplained. Curiosity had fueled our reading, but we exited the book without it having been satisfied. Then I told him I was going to praise I Who Have Never Known Men for not explaining. The scenario that the narrator lives out in Hartman’s book is extreme (hit the link for a quick synopsis)—strange situation/strange environment. We watch her come to terms with it—but not understand it. In other words, not-knowing is the circumstance of the book, its armature, its state of being. I remember when I was first out of grad school teaching poetry to kids, and some grade-schooler would write this wild scrap of story, then feel compelled to end it with and then my mother woke me up for school. Disappointing but understandable. There’s no and then my mother woke me up for school in I Who Have Never Known Men. She endures without understanding, and so do we.

9

Markson: I’m a fan of a four-pack of sui generis books he wrote late in life, the so-called Notecard Quartet [more on that here, note 13]. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a wholly different animal. It’s considered experimental. It’s on my shelf of WTF books (along with Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) and Anna Kavan’s, Ice (1967).

10

McEwan: My two favorites: Atonement (2001) and On Chesil Beach (2007).

]]><![CDATA[Cli-Fi [2]]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/cli-fi-2https://longd.substack.com/p/cli-fi-2Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:53:17 GMT
“Electoral Campaign” by Isaac Cordal [Berlin, April 2011]
[Please visit Cordal’s amazing gallery]
Quick note from the flight deck:
First: Big thanks to new followers (and old followers) . . . everything’s free here @ David’s Lists 2.0, so you might as well subscribe. How come? Because I’ll know how many of you there are. And maybe we’ll zip through the 500-subscriber wall. True, last time I said something like this, 20-some subscribers went (in the words of Jeff Tiedrich, Substacker extraordinaire), fuckity-bye. When you’ve never stopped being a New England boy at heart, this makes perfect sense. Did the universe detect a smidge of braggadocio in your voice?
In any case, thanks for showing up. This Substack is what I do these days, and I quite like the thought of connecting my mind to your minds. Please try to read the posts on a laptop or tablet, hang in there with the footnotes, click on links, leave a comment once in a while.
Second: This post was going to be an omnibus update of earlier posts . . . but speculative lit is rife with cli-fi these days, so we’ll stick with that today. Unlike the novels in the first Cli-fi post (which I’d read roughly half of) today’s titles are mostly new to me (ones I’ve read are asterisked).
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In the past week, I’ve heard reports about the weakening of the Gulfstream [if you haven’t thought about what the Gulfstream does for England/northern Europe: London is about as far north as Edmonton, Alberta], as well as a report on the collapse of the insect kingdom [think dominoes]. Etc. Frankly, this provides little relief from doomscrolling the death of American democracy [though, of course, they all have the same cause].

That so many fiction writers have taken up this subject comes as no shock—cli-fi is where hard science, end-times philosophy, public policy, thriller/slipstream/speculative writing meet up. Think of a Venn Diagram—there’s a “sweet spot” where readers who never read traditional sci-fi, who never read fantasy or horror or nonfiction science, readers committed primarily to realism, readers who consider themselves “serious readers” . . . can find themselves at the same table in the cafeteria.

Believe it or not, there are novels too gross/icky/perverse for me. I like the classics, I like character-driven novels, I like to watch human dilemmas play out. I like stories that catch me off-guard. I don’t like crappy/trivial/smug/vapid/bland/doofus-y writing. Yesterday, I stopped reading a speculative novel —not due to any of the sins just named, but because it just wasn’t triggering that nodule in my brain that tingles/shimmers/twitches when exposed to smart sentences, non-generic/voicey sentences, sentences that surprise, sentences that tell me I’m going to be smarter if I keep reading.

Whereas, one I read the week before (my favorite of the year, so far)—not cli-fi, but dystopian in a fresh way—I devoured. I Who Have Never Known Men (1995) by Jacqueline Harpman.1 The writing (in translation) isn’t snazzy—it’s rather plain, fact-giving. Its smartness comes from what I call “the mind of the story,” the intelligence that created this way of speaking. I don’t want to divulge more—I’ll come back to this novel in a later post. But one of its great strengths exists in what it doesn’t say. The narrator starts her story from a position of not knowing what accounts for her situation; thus, unavoidably, she leaves us in the dark. [More on that here.2 ]

Link to first cli-fi post
19 March 2024

1. A Baker’s Dozen of New Cli-Fi Novels:

2. The Climate Fiction Prize:

2026 Shortlist:

2025 Shortlist:

Fifteen Compelling New Climate Fiction Reads [from New York Public Library]

Climate Fiction That Will Haunt You!

LitHub: Matthew Salesses on the Possibilities of Climate Fiction

LitHub: On the False Promise of Climate Fiction: Are We Already Beyond Raising Awareness?

The Guardian view on climate fiction: No longer the stuff of sci-fi

Sarah Holdings top 10 cli-fi books [The Guardian]

Tales for a Better Future: The Rise of Climate Fiction

The Climate Fiction Prize

Birth Year Project:

Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve picked off 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census of years done: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

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1

Who Have Never Known Men: Harpman was from Belgium—writer, psychoanalyst, Holo-caust survivor. I’m happy to see this getting attention recently. This new edition from Transit Books was translated from French by Ros Schwartz, 1997.

2

. . . in the dark: This can happen for one of two reasons: a) It’s a feint by the writer, setting us up for a “reveal,” or b) the writer wants to bind us tightly to the character’s POV—thus, if she’s in the dark, we’re in the dark. And maybe she remains in the dark all the way to the end—no reveal to her, no reveal to us. Which, since we’ve been so steeped in the structures of mass entertainment, can be shocking—the “no reveal” being the reveal, if that makes sense. [Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the episode of M*A*S*H where practical-joker Hawkeye waits all day for retribution by his former victims, expecting each interaction to be a trap . . . the real trap being there is no trap—his day-long unrequited suspicion being his punishment.]

One more thought, OK? You may have heard me gripe about Pynchon’s Against the Day—I was looking forward to the ingenuous tying together of this very long novel’s narrative threads, which would’ve made for a doozy of a reveal . . . except that (in my reading, anyway) there was no knitting, no central thing that brought all those pages to a point. In other words, he wrote his way toward a four-digit page-count by “throwing something else into the bag”—when the bag was full, he said, “The End.” Which pissed me off (to use the technical term). It pissed me off because one of the essential qualities of art is unitas [along with veritas and claritas]. If unity/cohesion is missing, then I feel let down, I feel like the writer has just been fucking around (to use the technical term), I feel like I’ve been lured into the thing under false pretenses. But wait, what if the miscellaneousness, the chaos, is the point? After all, modern life is all over the place, random, polygot, ungoverned by a central idea/principle—is that enough to act as unitas? Well, sometimes it is. But not in Against the Day. IMHO.]

3

Wild Dark Shore: I’m purposely not learning much about this one before I get to it; it has attracted lots of ink. At the Seattle Public Library there are 889 holds on 160 e-copies (I’ve never run into numbers like these). See also, Migrations (2020).

4

The Unmapping: Not sure if this qualifies as cli-fi, but it’s been popping up on lists and sounded kind of irresistible. From the blurbage: There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island. The next night, it happens again.

I’m halfway through it. Ensemble cast, mostly members of Emergency Services staff. It’s holding up.

[This was published by Bindery Books. A publisher with a different model. Check out their website.]

5

*I Cheerfully Refuse: I read this one last week. Lake Superior, dystopian near-future, civilization beleaguered but hanging on. The story of Rainy, Lark, and a feral nine-year-old girl, Sol. The story has a whiff of the otherworldly/mystical, but just a whiff. It’s a good read, adventurish but a kind of love story as well. I began to feel that it might end on a note I couldn’t buy, then it didn’t. Bravo.

6

The Shutouts: Korn has an interesting article at LitHub: “Why We Need More Queer Sex in Climate Fiction; Or, on Rereading Rachel Carson.”

7

How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster: Kirkus’s review.

8

*Lost Ark Dreaming: From a LitHub piece: Okungbowa has described this post-flood Africanfuturist novella as a vertical Snowpiercer, no doubt due to the evocative image of the Pinnacle, a former high-rise now partially submerged by the waters that radically transformed Lagos. Within this newly stratified tower, social class comes with your proximity to—or distance from—sea level; and it’s one of five buildings, formerly known as the Fingers, whose inhabitants compete for survival.

Okungbowa is a well-regarded Nigerian sci-fi writer, now teaching in Ottowa. I have mixed feelings about this one. He had good stuff to work with, but it felt like he gave in to the urge to write a conventional, action-oriented story. It’s called a novella, but it seemed like a much fuller novel truncated before it explored the material deeply.

9

The Unworthy: Argentinian. Her award-winning novel Tender Is the Flesh (2017) was an international bestseller.

10

The Endling: The link in the list will take you to an NPR review. And here’s a link to its Bookmarks page at LitHub. I put this on the TBR.

11

The Book of Records: Candian, winner of their Giller Prize, for 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing [included in Reading Project [25]: Reading Canada]. Married to novelist Rawi Hage (read his stuff, too). The Book of Records is published by the great indie press, Milkweed Editions. Deep catalog of great writing. This on is also on my TBR.

12

Orbital: Possibly the recognizable title in today’s list—the 2024 Booker winner. It’s come up in several prior posts—here’s the note from David’s Reading Life 2024:

  • The International Space Station circumnavigates the Earth sixteen times a day—sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets, as witnessed by its international crew of six. Science/fact plus interior meditation. Can be read in one sitting.

]]><![CDATA[Sixes [5]: ]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/sixes-4-six-short-passageshttps://longd.substack.com/p/sixes-4-six-short-passagesMon, 13 Apr 2026 13:03:08 GMT
“In Alexandria, Egypt” by Rhona Haszard (1930)

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Hey, it’s David’s Lists 2.0’s third anniversary! One hundred and thirty posts!

Thanks for stopping by. Special welcome for new recruits.1 I promise not to waste your time.

A small gift for you all: the epigraph of Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov’s novel, Death and the Penguin (1996):

          A militia major is driving along when he sees a militiaman standing with a penguin.
              “Take him to the zoo,” he orders.
         Some time later the same major is driving along when he sees the militiaman still with 
         the penguin. 
               “What have you been doing?” he asks. “I said take him to the zoo.”
              “We’ve been to the zoo, Comrade Major,” says the militiaman, “and the circus. 
              And now we’re going to the pictures.”

About the Sixes:

You know how you have a strew of loose stuff on your workbench, and it’s just loose stuff, but if you scoop it up and put it in a box, grab your Sharpie and mark the box Loose Stuff, now you have one thing, and you even feel kinda organized?

Like that.

Today’s Sixes is small collection of short passages having in common that I like them, despite their not resembling each other . . . which is a reminder that good writing comes in myriad flavors, and that (if you keep you mind alert and open) you can recognize excellence even when it comes in a flavor you’re not wild about.

Who wrote them is saved for the notes.

[There’s an index to the Sixes here and on the home page.]

1.

The day Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat ripping the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising up from the floor below, the pelvic thrust of an “item number”: dancing across a neighbor’s TV; a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree, Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes, in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had no time for such frivolity. The poor were puritans by night and day. As for the old, they had rites of their own and did not need to wait for evening. With the sun stabbing at them through their window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet, and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape to escape the consequences of chance.2

2.

He slipped lightly downstairs into the dusky street, counting his money and smiling. It was the best hour of the day in Alexandria—the streets turning slowly to the metallic blue of carbon paper but still giving off the heat of the sun. Not all the lights were on in the town, and the large mauve parcels of dusk moved here and there, blurring the outlines of everything, repainting the hard outlines of buildings and human beings in smoke. Sleepy cafés woke to the whine of mandolines, which merged in the shrilling of heated tyres on the tarmac of streets now crowded with life, with white-robed figures and the scarlet dots of tarbushes. The window-boxes gave off a piercing smell of slaked earth and urine. The great limousines soared away from the Bourse with softly crying horns, like polished flights of special geese. To be half-blinded by the mauve dusk, to move lightly, brushing shoulders with the throng, at peace, in that dry inspiriting air . . . these were the rare moments of happiness upon which he stumbled by chance, by accident.3

3.

“Little Red” Garlock, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotted pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River near the foot of Pitt Street, must not have sunk as he’d been intended to sink, or floated as far. As the morning mist begins to lift from the river a solitary fisherman sights him, or the body he has become, trapped and bobbing frantically in pilings about thirty feet offshore. It’s the buglelike cries of gulls that alert the fisherman—gulls with wide gunmetal-gray wings, dazzling snowy heads and tail feathers, dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched. The kind you think might be a beautiful bird until you get up close.4

4.

When he came upon the hermit, he saw that the man’s left cheek was as swollen and as shiny as a ripe apple. Gilbert shuffled his feet and stared at the ground and held his hand against the cheek. Even the flies were solicitous of their sponsor’s pain and seemed to buzz more gingerly about him. Howard cocked his head in a silent question.

Gilbert whispered, Tooth.

Howard could not imagine that this old husk of a man, this recluse who seemed not much more than a sour hank of hair and rags had a tooth left in his head to ache. Nevertheless, it was true. Stepping closer, Gilbert opened his mouth and Howard, squinting to get a good look, saw in that dank, ruined purple cavern, stuck in the back of an otherwise-empty levee of gums, a single black tooth planted in a swollen and bright red throne of flesh. A breeze caught the hermit’s breath and Howard gasped and saw visions of slaughterhouses and dead pets under porches.5

5.

Fuck it but he was tired, he was just bloody tired; knackered and drained, knackered and drained; nay energy; nay fuck all; he just wanted to sleep, to sleep and then wake up; refreshed and fucking enerfuckinggetic, enerfuckinggenetised. Mind you that was something about this being blind; how ye were so knackered all the time, it was cause ye were using so much fucking muscle power in every other direction, the compensa-tion process, all this groping about ye were doing and fucking knocking fuck out of yerself off cupboards and doors and fucking lampposts man ye were fuckt, nay wonder ye needed to sleep all the time.6

6.

Tonight they will partake of cold corned beef with a spoonful of homemade relish, some dressed potatoes at the side, cups of sweet tea and then a fine pudding. . . . Cuyler Goodwill, aged twenty-eight, two years married, will never in his life have tasted Malvern pudding. (That’s what she’s preparing for—his stunned and mild look of confusion, that tender, grateful male mouth dropping open in surprise. It’s the least she can do, surprise him like this.) She sets a flower-patterned plate carefully on top of the pudding and weights it with a stone.

A cool place, the recipe says: “Set the mould in a cool place.” (The book is an old one, printed in England more than thirty years ago, its pages limp, but the author’s tone vigorous and pungent.) Yet where on a day like today is Mercy Goodwill to find a cool place? Even the dark stone floor under the cellar steps where she stores her milk and butter and lard has warmed up, giving off this last fortnight a queer sour smell.7

[https://www.littlesugarsnaps.com/malvern-pudding/]

Birth Year Project:

Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve picked off 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census of years done: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

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1

Hey, good to see you down here! Want to remind you that this Substack is best if you click through to the Substack site, then read on a tablet or laptop. And don’t even think about skipping the footnotes—that’s where all the good stuff is.

2

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, Salman Rushdie (2025). First paragraph of short story, “In the South,” first published in The New Yorker, May 11, 2009.

I like Rushdie’s wide-angle lens here—the beauty of some openings results from the tightness of the focus, but some work the other way. Rushdie states the central fact (Junior falling down) but lets us see the context—and notice that he’s actually doing what he says he’s going to do: describing the day Junior fell down.

Stories (as opposed to just any chunk of prose) tell us about the unexpected thing—we enter every story listening for: Ordinarily . . . but today. This is what makes it a story. But, having evoked that dynamic, he makes us wait. Fiction unfolds in time—and, yes, it’s possible to screw up this making-us-wait (by going on too long, making too many side trips or otherwise losing sight of what you’re doing . . . although this “going on too long” might be part of the plan, especially with a first-person narrator—that is a way of speaking that characterizes her; after digressing you can have say, But, anyway, what I really wanted to tell you is . . .

[Quick aside: In Denis Johnson’s iconic book, Jesus’ Son (stories or a novel, you can make a case for either), he does a move that tickles the bejesus out of me, as follows: The second story is called “Two Men”; it starts: “I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veteran of Foreign Wars Hall” and he relates what happened. Six stories later, there’s one called, “The Other Man”; it starts, “But I never finished telling you about the two men.”]

3

From Mountolive, Book Three of The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1958). This book diverts attention from the Englishman, Darley, whose fascination with a married woman, Justine, and her exotic Alexandrian cohort was the focus of Book One (at its end, Darley and his dead girlfriend’s young daughter depart for an island off the Egyptian coast. As Book Two begins, Balthazar [from Book One] arrives on the island via the mail boat, returns Darley’s manuscript (the book we’ve just read), saying there was more to Justine’s story than he (Darley) knew. Thus, Balthazar is a re-telling of Justine with more of the secrets/backstories laid bare. Book Three centers on British diplomat, David Mountolive. I’ve always loved the feel of this passage, the transitional hour of the day . . . the metallic blue of carbon paper . . . large mauve parcels of dusk . . .

Readers wanting plot often slide over top of such paragraphs—they treat description as filler. But we know better, right? Again, context—or, really, world-building. I’ve always loved William Gass’s line:

  • In fiction there is no such thing as description, there is only construction.

Even if your fiction is based on something IRL, it’s still fiction, still a product of your mind. I used to tell students: if it’s raining in a story it’s because it’s a story with rain—a story with sun is a different story. Everything matters, everything coheres in order to make a story. Description is never extra.

4

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Joyce Carol Oates (1990). Opening paragraph of Chapter One. This is nasty stuff, but the writing is gorgeously visceral. Oates writes way too much, but when she’s on she unsettles you—she has a way of saying something then undermining it, leaving you angsty. Many of you will have read her slim novel, Black Water (1992), a retelling of the Edward Kenendy/Mary Jo Kopechne/Chappaquiddick story [or, if you’re younger, perhaps “Chappaquiddick” holds no meaning for you?]. If you’re wondering about the title, it’s the final line of a Stephen Crane poem from 1895 (“In the Desert”).

Other Oates works I’m fond of: You Must Remember This (1987), Blonde (2000), The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) . . . she writes a lot of short fiction as well—there was a collection of flash-sized pieces, The Assignation (1988)—see if you can find “A Touch of the Flu.”

5

Tinkers, Paul Harding (2009) pp. 40-41. I might’ve quoted the last part of this in a prior post, but, well, here it is again. One night some years ago, I tried to read it to my wife in bed, but kept being overcome with the urge to explode; moments later, we were both lost in one of those laughing jags where you can’t breathe. You know the kind. Anyway, this was Harding’s first novel [it’s quite slim] and was a surprise winner or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

6

How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman (1994). Working-class drunk beaten blind by the cops, then set loose to make his way home, etc. Narrated in pure Glaswegian dialect. Caused a major flap when it won the 1994 Booker. Read about it at the link. I think it’s a novel that does what a novel should do. William Gass (again): A memorable character is a bright, human image. This narrator isn’t a paragon of virtue, but he’s a man who’s been wronged and abandoned. I want to keep listening to him. I pity the members of the Booker committee who stuck their noses up at this work.

7

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1993). Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. The main character’s mother, still a new wife, in Manitoba, 1905. Shields’ prose is so . . . I don’t know what to call it, even. It’s beautifully controlled. It begins omniscient, telling us what will occur later, uses a slightly old-fashioned or elevated word, “partake.” But she does so much here—we learn that she’s not just feeding her young husband, she wants to amaze him. But as the passage develops we get more inside her—the narrative voice is colored by her interior voice; in the line: Yet where on a day like today is Mercy Goodwill to find a cool place? you can hear her saying, Oh, where am I supposed to find a cool place on a day like this?? And throughout the short passage there’s a tight focus, close observation, intimate knowledge of such things as old cookbooks and what dairy products smell like when you can’t keep them cold enough. This is prose that wins your trust.

]]><![CDATA[Novels to Screenplays]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/novels-to-screenplayshttps://longd.substack.com/p/novels-to-screenplaysMon, 30 Mar 2026 13:01:12 GMT
David Hemmings/Blow-Up
[This post is a spinoff of Reading Project [27]: Plays]

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1. Five Easy Pieces

Mid-August, in the 1990s, the Yellow Bay Writers’ Workshop was held on the east shore of Flathead Lake, south of Kalispell, Montana, where I lived. It was there I got to know an aging screenwriter named Charles Eastman, up from L.A. to learn about writing fiction. He was paunchy, had been years on the wagon, was a fount of stories told in the gentle manner of someone carrying old wounds. Everyone loved him. A few of his scripts had become movies—one was Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), Robert Redford, Michael J. Pollard, Lauren Hutton. Besides that, he had another claim to fame (in my book, at least): he was the brother of Carole Eastman,1 who’d written what was then, and maybe still is, my favorite film, Five Easy Pieces (1970).

A couple of years ago, I had the wild idea of writing a prose sequel to that film. About twenty pages in I came to see the folly of the project. I sometimes forget that time keeps rolling on—I’m still twenty-something when I think about Five Easy Pieces; in reality, it’s fifty-six years old—some of you may never have heard of it, much less seen it, much less revere it. Not only that, if you watched it now, you wouldn’t see it the way I did back then—you wouldn’t be so enamored of Jack Nicholson’s anti-hero persona, for instance. Anyway, I gathered up materials—stills and YouTube clips and so on—of the ending in particular, because I wanted to keep going from that point.

When I went to get the screenplay, I realized that the shooting script wasn’t exactly the one Carole had written (though much was the same). I ended up with copies of both versions. [I should add that, these days, via the internet, you often find “dialog scripts”—just the spoken words of the released film. Unauthorized.]

All this by way of introducing the odd pleasure of reading a screenplay. I’d love to stick in the screenplay pages of that last scene, but there’s no room. Sorry. If you’re interested you can access it here.

2. Novels/Scripts [1]: Some thoughts

If you’re a reader who writes—I used to tell students—you read with one eye on the story, the other on the craft. (An ungainly metaphor, when you picture it, but let’s keep going.) It’s hard to learn from other writers—it’s not hands-on, like woodworking, say. It’s more a case of hanging out with other people’s excellent prose, hearing it, paying attention to it, absorbing it.2 But sometimes you do pop the cover off and look at what the gears and sprockets are up to.

Once in a while, you get the chance to compare how a given chunk of material is handled in different genres. You get to see the prose stripped bare—a few spoken words, a few beats of action. Look at how Harper Lee constructed her courtroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel, then how she and co-writer Horton Foote handled them in the movie script. You see evidence of the questions they asked themselves: What matters most? Where’s the fulcrum of the scene? What needs saying overtly? Which specific molecules of prose, if cut, make the scene’s essence disappear?

Or try it with any accessible adaptation:

  • The Woman in Cabin 10, Ruth Ware, novel (2016), film (2025)

  • Room, Emma Donohue, novel (2010), film (2015)

  • The Life of Pi, Yann Martel, novel (2001), film (2012)

  • Carrie, Stephen King, novel (1974), film (1976).

3. Scripts/Novels [2]: The English Patient

Once in a while, you get to compare three iterations of a story—novel, screenplay, film. The English Patient makes a great example because: a) both novel and film are sublime works of art, b) the screenplay was written by the film’s director (a writer with his own bagful of credentials—Bafta Award, Emmy, Prix Italia, etc.), and c) the screenplay was published as a handsome paperback with illuminating front matter by Minghella, Ondaatje and Saul Zaentz (the producer).

  • The English Patient [novel], Michael Ondaatje (1992).3

  • The English Patient [screenplay], Anthony Minghella (1996).

  • The English Patient [film], Anthony Minghella (1996).

4. Scripts/Novels [3]: The Lists

a) Four Good Screenplays Adapted from Novels:

b) Two great Screenplays Adapted from Nonfiction:

c) One Novel, Multiple Screenplays:

Great books (and great plays) are constantly re-made—to generate new audiences, to re-interpret the text, to use more sophisticated technology, etc. The net is rife with lists:

Comparing adaptations is another way becoming intimate with a text—and your own reading of it. Which Gatsby is better, which Little Women?

More often than we realize, an American film (or TV series) is a re-make of one from abroad. The Kurt Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell5 have both Swedish and British television adaptations. We get to ponder who inhabits Wallander best—Krister Henriksson or Kenneth Branagh? Ditto for the films of Steig Larsen’s, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Noomi Rapace or Rooney Mara?6

But what I really wanted to call your attention to is The Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy by Chinese computer engineer and novelist, Liu Cixin (2006-2010)7

  • The Three-Body Problem (2006) [Trans. from Mandarin Chinese by Ken Liu (2014)]

  • The Dark Forest (2008) [Trans. from Mandarin Chinese Joel Martinsen (2015)]

  • Death’s End (2010) [Trans. from Mandarin Chinese by Ken Liu (2016)]

d) Adapting Novels: Two Special Cases:

The issue here is point-of-view. The novel is first-person, told by Chief Broom, an Oregon State Mental Hospital patient (inmate?). He’s half-Indian, physically imposing but silent—he pretends to be “deaf and dumb,” which lets him in on everyone’s conversation as he goes about mopping.

In first-person fiction, of course, everything is filtered through the narrator—we see/hear only what he describes for us, and it’s in his voice, having his particular spin. He might be lying/exaggerating/joking/fantasizing (that is, being an “unreliable narrator”). Or he might, on the other hand, be an obsessive truthteller (which is twisty in its own way since the whole shebang is made up). Anyway, movies are always in third-person (sometimes called “third-person objective”). We see everyone from the outside . . . except when voice-overs are used (more on that here9).

So how do you compensate for the loss of the narrator’s spin? A two-part answer: a) what we see isn’t really naked/objective—it’s been spun by the team of director/cinematographer/editor, and b) the story and the acting have to keep us glued to the screen. Cuckoo’s Nest does that. Jack Nicholson’s bravura portrayal of Randle Patrick McMurphy is unlookawayable.10 Chief Broom is still a character (and he has crucial part to play in the film’s ending), but he’s no longer the centerpole of the story.

Speaking of unreliable narrators . . . I can’t talk about this one without giving away its big spoiler. Stop now if you want to avoid spoilage. OK, as readers of the book know, there’s a major act of trickery afoot in the novel—the two principal characters are actually the same person. Easy in prose, a major problem in film because we’re looking right at both characters.12

e) Three Novels Transformed by the Film:

Dick has had a cult following for years—for the novels and for his influence on subsequent speculative writers. I’ve never read Androids . . . I read his alt-history novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), always meant to try another but never did. I’m tempted to say he was more gifted at thinking stuff up than putting it on paper (he’s a pedestrian sentence writer). This is no doubt a minority opinion. Anyway, he’s one of the most written-about sci-fi writers. Below, I’ll post a couple sites that explain the differences between Dick’s novel and Ridley Scott’s film. This is an example of an adaptation that starts with the basic story and by changing a series of details makes something new—it’s not simply tweaking the novel for dramatic purposes, it’s a re-imagining of the story, constructing a moody, visually stunning artifact in which everything coheres. You’ve heard me say this before, but here it is again: A work of art is saturated with what it’s about—cut it open anywhere and you find that particular story matter.13

[Oh, and ever wonder about the title, Blade Runner?14]

Blow-Up [film], Michelangelo Antonioni (1966):

A genre-redefining film—it came out the year my freshman year of college; I loved it (I can still almost play it straight through in my head). That same year, I read Carlos Fuentes, getting my first taste of the Latin American Boom [aka El Boom] and read Julio Cortazar. Blow-up is based on a Cortazar short story, “Las babas del diablo” (later retitled after the success of the film). If Blade Runner was a refinement or re-interpretation, Blow-Up is the creation of a new story using the central thematic elements from an earlier one—that ambiguity can lie at the heart of photographic images, that a character must sometimes live in a state of not-knowing the true nature of what he has witnessed.

About Schmidt [novel], Louis Begley (1996)

About Schmidt [film], screenplay by Alexander Payne (2002)

By chance, I read this novel at roughly the same time the film came out. The film . . . well, it has the same title as the novel; they both have an old guy (Jack Nicholson in the film), and maybe there were some other overlaps, I forget. Talk about taking liberties, I thought. But I discovered that, in fact, the screenplay was a entirely different project, written before the book. The screenwriter, Alexander Payne, says his original script was about "an old guy who retires, and realizes how much he’s wasted his life, and wants somehow to start anew, The Graduate at age sixty-five." The screenplay was rejected, but after Begley’s novel appeared, Payne secured the rights and melded the two works together. Despite his particulars being replaced by Payne’s particulars, Begley wrote in the New York Times that “my most important themes were treated with great intelligence and sensitivity.”

Aside: This section was supposed to be Four Novels Transformed by Film . . . I was going to tell you about Scott Spencer’s 1995 novel, Men in Black15 in which a writer (a serious writer mind you), tires of making no money, decides to slum it and write a sci-fi novel, and (irony of ironies!) finds success.

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1

Carole Eastman: Here’s a quick appreciation from The Cinema Cafe (complete with a clip of the infamous ordering toast scene). And Carole’s Wiki.

2

Hanging out with other people’s writing: People who’ve hung around with me are undoubtedly sick of this one, but it’s a core belief, Saul Bellow’s dictum: A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

3

The English Patient [novel]: I came to this novel cold, no frame of reference. I found myself a bit lost . . . how did the parts hook up, where and when were we? Then, the second time through, I couldn’t believe I’d been confused. Some novels don’t hold you by the hand—they ask you to work some things out on your own. Anyway, I love this novel.

4

Killers of the Flower Moon:

5

Henning Mankell: I just visited his Wiki page and was freshly blown away by his accomplishments—besides the 13 Wallanders, he wrote a slew of other novels and children’s books, and several dozen plays, besides which he was a heavy-duty political activist, etc. You should have a look.

6

Rooney Mara: I know who gets my vote.

7

Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy: I loved reading these—deeply engaging, gave the impression of serious science. I was hot to see how they’d come out on the screen. As it turns out, there were two versions, one American, one Chinese (actually, three—there was an earlier Chinese adaptation that didn’t get aired).

The first season of the American version [8 episodes] appeared on Netflix in 2024. Some aspects of the story were transposed to England. I watched eagerly. It has an embedded strangeness that gets inside you. Parsing the critical response in both countries as well as the cultural commentary is way too complicated to get into here. You can read Wiki’s summary.

And read about the 30-episode Chinese adaptation here.

And read about the three-body problem in physics here.

8

Cuckoo’s Nest: The link at the title will take you to Bookshop.org. Once at the opening page, you’ll see that the novel generated a slew of books analyzing it—lit crit, studies of the psychiatric treatments, and various other aspects. Not to mention merch:

9

Voice-overs: Sometimes, after test screenings, the money people will insist that voice-overs be inserted because the film is deemed hard to follow. A famous example is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982). There have been multiple “cuts” of this film, some with, some without. Generally, directors hate adding voice-overs—film being a visual medium, the images should do the job; they see the addition of voice-overs as dumbing the work down. [I need to say, also, that the various editions of Blade Runner are confusingly named—the “director’s cut,” for instance, wasn’t done by the director, Scott. If you’re up for a rundown of these iterations, go here.]

That said, some voice-overs are an intrinsic element of the film—they can act like a Greek chorus, or add wry commentary/counter voice to what we’ve just seen. You probably won’t recognize this name, but Jean Shepherd’s films and TV series are a great example—hang with me a moment, OK? A Christmas Story (1983) you do know—Red Ryder B.B. gun, lamp in the shape of a lady’s leg, kid’s tongue frozen to the flagpole? That film was a remake of a Jean Shepherd piece called The Phantom of the Open Hearth (hilarious!), which was based on his book, Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories (1971). I’m sorry more people don’t remember him. Read about him here.

Another good example of voice-over as a commentary on the action is Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), an early Dustin Hoffman vehicle, based on Thomas Berger’s novel of the same name (1964). Another of my favorites. I wrote about LBM in Birth Year Project 1964 (footnote 3).

10

Nicholson: The film, cast, crew, etc. won a slew of awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Nicholson.

11

Fight Club screenplay: See this also—a good analysis of the film.

12

A major problem in film: Since one of the actors involved is Edward Norton (Brad Pitt’s the other), I’ll mention a different Norton film, Primal Fear (1996), which demonstrates one strategy for coping with this problem: multiple personality—both characters look the same on the outside. The film is a “legal thriller” revolving around the defense of a character charged with killing a priest. It manages to pull of a major trick: the guy on trial is a hapless dim-witted young man; his defense is that he has another personality within him—evil, manipulative, contemptuous of his host. We buy it (or at least I did)—the poor kid should get off, it’s not his fault. Then the reveal: it’s all an act—the dim-wit is a creation perpetrated by the real character, the conniving amoral personality.

13

Saturated with what it’s about: I always use the example of Picasso’s “Guernica”—every square inch of the canvas contains Guernica-ness.

14

Blade Runner, the title: The term doesn’t appear in Dick’s novel. It was invented by doctor/sci-fi writer, Alan E. Nourse, who titled his 1974 novel Bladerunner—his bladerunner was a doctor who dealt in contraband medical equipment. William S. Burroughs [of Naked Lunch fame] wrote a (much-altered) screen adaptation of Nourse’s novel, which he couldn’t sell, and then turned into a novel (confusingly) titled Blade Runner: A Movie (subsequently filmed by someone else as Talking Tiger Mountain.

Then: Ridley Scott asked co-writer, Hampton Francher, to come up with a name for Rick Deckard’s profession; Francher remembered Burroughs’ novel, liked how “bladerunner” sounded, borrowed it for Deckard, and later it became the film’s title (since Dick’s title was too ungainly and because the story had changed significantly). Got that?

15

Men in Black: Novel by Scott Spencer (1995), in which a serious writer scores a hit only when he writes a schlocky sci-fi novel about UFOs. I was going to say that filmmakers ditched everything except the sci-fi story within the story when making the first Men in Black film. Then I come to find out the that the film was based on a comic book series, written before Spencer’s novel. I can find nothing that connects the two other than the shared title.

]]><![CDATA[Reading Projects [27]: Plays]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-27-playshttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-27-playsMon, 16 Mar 2026 13:01:46 GMT
[Any sign of him? Naw, not a trace. Bloody hell.]

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1.

When’s the last time you read a play (not counting Shakespeare)?

A few years back, picking off rogue years in my quest to read a novel1 published in each year, I’d sometimes read a play instead:

My Life List has a scattering of others—read, not seen (or seen only when filmed or adapted for film):

Some I read because of who wrote them:

Or because I’d read the source book and wanted to see how a master transmuted scholarship into a drama—for instance, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, Marion L. Starkey (1949) became:

Or sometimes because I loved the book and the film, I wanted to read the screenplay:

Or even because the writer’s an offbeat rubber-faced character actor whose father was the long-time editor of The New Yorker and whose plays are wryly off-kilter:

And a few others I read after seeing the play live.

I should also include Spalding Gray’s monologs6:

2.

I like reading scripts. I like thinking about the technical and/or aesthetic differences between versions of the same story. As a writer, I’m fascinated by how a naked line on the page can blossom with great acting (and directing/sound and lighting/editing and production design and so on). I like to isolate a moment in film and think about how I’d say it on a page of fiction, and wonder how much of the moment was in the script and how much was improvised or given meaning by a tight shot of a mouth or gesture.

Anyway, the other day I scanned down the list of the last 40 years of the Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists. Of the 120 plays, I’d seen three. I recognized maybe 15 percent of the names: August Wilson, Edward Albee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wendy Wasserman, David Mamet, Horton Foote, Neil Simon, John Guare, and a few more. This is the mainstream stuff—there are surely lists of contemporary playwrights that have many more names I’ve never heard of.

I think my point here is that the worlds of literary fiction and playwriting occupy separate islands. Some renowned novelists have written plays7. The only writer I can think of who achieved excellence in both genres was Chekhov (who wrote short stories, not novels—and was a medical doctor).8

[Anton, you sly dog!]

What to make of this?

First, I guess, see more plays. If you like musical theatre, fine, there are great musicals, but I’m referring to plays that don’t have as their primary goal making you feel good.9

With the predominance of film, plays have gotten short shrift—as mentioned, they’re expensive to see live, hard to find/access via streaming, and in bookstores they tend to be off on their own you’re not sure where. Which is a pity, really. Because some of our finest writers are playwrights. Then again, they’re not that hard to find—you just have to decide to do it. And, most contemporary plays take less time to read than a skinny novel.

25 Must-Read Plays

51 Contemporary Plays Written After 2000

The Top 25 Plays of the 21st Century So Far

5 Contemporary Playwrights You Should Know About Right Now

Five Emerging Playwrights to Keep Your Eyes On…

Ten Plays You Can Read Like Novels: On the Pleasures of the Script as Literature

Plays vs. Novels (You’ll Never Guess What Happens Next)

10 Novels by Playwrights (And 3 Novels by Actors)

5 Dramatists as Novelists: The Joy of Reading Plays

The Project/Challenge:

  1. On the way down here, you passed a section of links. I haven’t done the math, but there must be over a hundred titles and brief descriptions. I’d like you to visit enough of these that you’re able to collect a small pile of play descriptions you might want to read (most will be in print, but you’ll need to check).

2. Once you’ve done that, pick out a couple and read them. Here’s an example, one that appealed to me:

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, Sam Steiner (2015)

  • A thought-provoking and intimate play set in a world where a government-imposed “Hush Law” limits individuals to speaking only 140 words per day. The story follows a couple, Bernadette and Oliver, as they navigate the challenges of their relationship in this restrictive new reality. Through clever, minimalist dialogue and poignant moments, the play explores themes of communication, connection, and the power of language. It’s a moving and inventive look at how we express ourselves and what remains unsaid. —from The Reading List/Duncan Macmillan

  1. Over the next six months, read six more plays, including:

  • a monolog,

  • a two-hander [Steiner’s play is one of these]10

  • something funny/goofy/absurd/whimsical,

  • something biting/caustic/politically charged/injustice-fighting,

  • one cited somewhere in today’s post.

  1. Acquaint/re-acquaint yourself with all the play-putting-on venues in your bailiwick. Start paying attention to their offerings. Try to see a play somewhere you’ve never visited before. If possible, check out their list of past productions—you might find one for the challenge.

Extra Credit:

Google a play that’s had multiple productions and have a look at the sets and costumes and so on—you should be able to access reviews or other commentary plus photos for them as well. When we watch, say, a new film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion we know we’re seeing a re-interpretation of the novel. Many plays/films adapted from classic are updated—the story may or may not be much altered, but remakes often reflect changed social attitudes, our ability to process information faster, evolved thoughts about where to draw the line between suggestion and depiction, how the lead actors should look (sometimes, unless race is a central issue in the work, casting may be “color-blind,” and so on. Pick a play that’s had two (or more) versions [or it could be a film based on a novel or play] and write a one-page response to their differences.

Alternately, consider staging a new production of a play you know: What would you do differently? How faithful do you think you should be to the playwrights staging notes in the script? Some are site/time-specific—for instance, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics11 takes place in Ybor City, a district of Tampa, Florida, where up until they were replaced by mechanization, Cuban immigrants rolled cigars; as they worked they were read to by a lector (a practice brought with them from Cuba). Anna, as in Anna Karenina. But many others might be transposed. Give it a shot.

Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve done 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.
Hello to any of you who’ve made it all the way down here. So here’s the deal: A while ago I announced that we’d broken through the 500-subscriber barrier . . . and immediately the fates said, Not so fast, bub, and twenty or so headed for the door. A few more snuck in while the door was ajar but we’re still shy of 500. Here’s my offer: If each of you loyalists bring in one thoughtful friend you’ll make me, you know . . . OK, here’s the thing (you’ve heard this before), the book bloggers over at Instagram have gazillions of followers and all they do is hold up a bunch of books and say, This one’s really cool! And I think, But, but . . .
In fairness, here are two guys I like:
https://www.instagram.com/_joshreadsbooks/
https://www.instagram.com/chrisreadsbooks_/
That’s it for today. See you in two weeks.
As I prepped this post, screenplays began slipping in the side door. I decided they needed their own post, which will appear either next time, or the time after.
For now, be stout-hearted. Take to the barricades!
LES-MISERABLES.-The-Barricade.-Photo-Matthew-Murphy - Birmingham Hippodrome
1

Novel: Usually, but sometimes—especially the farther back I got, it was a memoir, treatise, story/essay collection, journal or collection of letters . . . anyway, a book I considered literature.

2

Mamet: If you don’t know Mamet you should have a listen to his dialog. It’s not strictly realistic—it’s staccato, rapid, repetitive. It’s somehow the essence of a scene rather than what it would sound like if you were there IRL. I’m not saying you should emulate that sound, only that it’s possible to do it another way.

3

The Crucible: How to write about the Joe McCarthy/commie-under-every-bed/Senate hearings frenzy without mentioning it.

4

English Patient: Screenplays have to leave stuff out—it’s interesting watching how the screenwriters wrestle with this. In The English Patient, the backstory of Kip (the Sikh sapper, Hana’s lover) is cut which reduces his moral standing in the story. In another case, an image (being hoisted up to see murals in a cathedral by the light of a flare) is kept but given to a different character.

5

Wallace Shawn: One more tidbit . . . Shawn was one half of French director Louis Malle’s, My Dinner With Andre (1981), theatre director Andre Gregory being the other. Some years later, Shawn gathered actors (including Julianne Moore) to put on Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya in small theatres and other unusual venues—even people’s living rooms. Louis Malle got wind of the project and wanted to film it. Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is set in a rehearsal space—the actors arrive, sit and chat, etc.; after a while, you realize they’ve started doing the play. Here’s Roger Ebert’s take on it.

6

Spalding Gray: For whatever reason, I loved spending time in his head. I was lucky enough to see one of the monologs live in Seattle (I’ve seen the filmed versions of, I think, all of them). He came to a bad end, I’m sorry to report: after several false alarms, he slipped over the railing of the Staten Island Ferry in January 2004 . . . he’d suffered from bouts of mental turmoil for years, but visiting Ireland three years earlier, he’d been seriously injured in a car crash—broken hip, broken leg, fractured skull requiring a titanium plate. In 2011, excerpts from his journals were published and I acquired more of his backstory, including his early history with experimental theater, his many film roles, and long-time friendship with Willem Dafoe [The Journals of Spalding Gray, edited by Nell Casey (in collaboration with Gray’s widow, Kathie Russo)].

Today’s post is about reading plays, but in the case of Gray’s monologs, you should watch one one [easily available, I think] to get a feel for his delivery, also to hear his accent.

7

Novelists writing plays [1]: There’s also Jean Paul Sartre and Thornton Wilder.

8

Novelists writing plays [2]: AI helped with the above . . . or, you know, “helped.” First it wanted to tell me about plays based on novels. No, no, no, I said. You see, what I want to know is . . . AI said, Oh, hey, sorry, I get it now, and listed Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Frowny face. As it turns out, Arthur Miller did write one novel, Focus (1945). Ditto, Tennessee Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), and Suzan-Lori Parks, Getting My Mother’s Body (2003).

If you look at, say, the period from 1750-1850, you find many writers who had feet in both camps. What I was trying to suss out was major contemporary novelists who wrote a play or two. This appears to be too fine a distinction for my “helper.”

9

Making You Feel Good: Putting on plays is really expensive and no theatre company wants to go bust; the ones who produce the most serious (which includes seriously funny) contemporary plays have to walk a fine line. Often, it’s the small indie companies who put on eccentric/edgy/untested/outside-the-box plays—or sometimes university theatre departments. Check out the listings in your local What’s Going on in Weaverville freebies that include such venues along with the ones who can afford to advertise bigly.

https://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/great-literature-long-list-18th-century.html

10

Two-hander: The Gin Game is another. So are Topdog/Underdog, Frankie and Johnny in the Clare de Lune, and others.

11

Anna in the Tropics: Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

]]><![CDATA[Remembering: Novels about Memory [2]]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/remembering-novels-about-memory-2https://longd.substack.com/p/remembering-novels-about-memory-2Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:30:44 GMT
I promise not to waste your time.
—from Remembering Plains series, Alyson Kinkade
[https://www.alysonkinkade.com]
Note [a]: Please click through to the Substack site (i.e. don’t read from email notification). Why? It will make me happy to know you’re seeing posts the way I put them up. And they’re best read on tablet or laptop.
Note [b]: OK, this is difficult to write: It’s come to my attention that several of you are skipping the footnotes. I know, I know, hard to believe . . . because that’s where the juicy stuff is, you know? The nuggets of back story and whatnot, the1
Part One: https://longd.substack.com/p/remembering-novels-about-memory-1

Today’s post is the second part of a look at novels having to do with memory, ones that live at the speculative (or slipstream1) end of the spectrum.

Today’s novels fall into two piles:

  • ones about hanging onto memories/the past

  • ones about getting rid of memories/the past

[But before we get to those, why not muddy the waters and ask what the folks over at the physics table think about the past? If you feel up to it, have a look at this piece from Scientific American, “Why does time flow at all? Physicists struggle to find an answer”—it’ll give you the basics of the arguments. If you’re wondering why I’m bringing this up at all, see this note.2]

5. Preserving/Re-creating the Past:

When my kids were little, video cameras were just coming out—a friend of ours bought one; he came over the day we tore down a shed and taped a few minutes. That’s it, the only moving pictures of our sons before they were men. I kind of suspect it would break my heart to watch their childhoods all over again. In any case, the inexorable slipping-away-ness of things gives life its poignancy and its terrible . . . what to call it? Sadness-because-of-how-time-is? (The Germans probably have a 32-letter word for it.) It’s no surprise how often writers who let themselves step over the boundary of ordinary reality, do it to transcend time’s limitations. There are scads of time-travel novels; we’re going to skip those (except for the first book below) because we’re already familiar with those tropes. The four novels here are more unusual versions of preserving or re-creating the past.

Aeon Expeditions lets clients spend an hour in their past. Four of them, strangers, meet on the same day, one of great consequence to them jointly, as it turns out. Click on the link above for more.

A thumbnail from Wiki:

The novel follows an unnamed narrator and Gaustine, a psychiatrist who creates a clinic for people with Alzheimer's disease in Zürich. Each floor of the clinic recreates a decade in intricate detail, aiming to transport patients back in time to revisit their memories. Tasked with collecting past artifacts for the clinic, the narrator travels across countries. Soon, healthy people turn to the clinic to flee their monotonous lives and the idea becomes widespread when more clinics open. Referendums are held across Europe to decide which past decade each country should live in, in the future.

Nobel Laureate, Olga Tokarczuk: “. . . the most exquisite kind of literature, on our perception of time and its passing, written in a masterful and totally unpredictable style."

[High on my TBR list]

Guy loses his memory in a weird accident, gets a hefty settlement (with the stipulation that he never talk about the event). What’s he to do with the money? He gets a glimmer of memory, déjà vu-like . . . which sets into motion the activity that gives the novel its particular strangeness: He hires people to re-create his old building, then has them reenact sequences of seemingly trivial actions, over and over again, obsessively. Things escalate from there. The Guardian called it “splendidly odd.”

And finally:

If you’ve been onboard awhile, you’ve run into earlier comments about this work. Amis, son of a famous novelist of the Britain’s Angry Young Men period, Sir Kingsley Amis, was a genuine heavyweight on his own—fifteen novels, five story collections, ten nonfiction works. An acerbic, widely known public intellectual.

I’ve never seen much praise for this novel, but it blew me away. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a “preserving the past” book—it’s more a case of the past insinuating itself into later eras, up to the “now” where the book begins. It’s among a select group of books told in reverse order [in a flash piece I remember there’s a drowning; each sentence begins with, Before that . . . the final one being, devastatingly, Before that it was an ordinary day. There’s also as Harold Pinter’s play/film Betrayal5].

But the reversal in Time’s Arrow is another kettle of fish. It’s not that scenes are shown in reverse order; all actions are reversed as if the film were running backwards. A mouth opens, food is disgorged, placed in a can, sealed, taken to a grocery. I’ll try to explain why this is more than a parlor trick of a book without spoilers. It begins with a jolt of electricity creating, within the host character, a second entity/consciousness who must now figure out what’s going on, who he’s stuck inside of, and so on. He observes, makes conclusions. For instance: A woman is crying, the host character brings his hand to her face, pulls it forcefully away, and the woman stops crying. He must be a healer! Again, you’re tempted to call this gimmickry, but there’s a rock-solid reason at the heart of this strategy. We follow along, wondering. Eventually it all falls into place—we see that reversal is the essence of the story.

6. Altering/Destroying Memory:

Before turning to our other pile, we should make a quick distinction between:

  • novels where someone’s memories are altered (or erased),

  • novels where history is altered (or erased).

In the former, memory-altering occurs within the story, to a character. In the latter, only readers are aware that the story has diverted from standard history and entered the realm of thought experiment.

The example cited most often is Philip K. Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle (1962) in which Germany and its allies win WWII and take possession of North America. My own favorite is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004)—famous aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, the right wing/America First candidate wins the presidency in 1940, unleashing a wave of isolationism and antisemitism in America.

Four other well-regarded Alternate History novels:

Also, several lists.7

Remember The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet. Disappointed in love, people pay to have all traces of the failed relationship excised from their memory banks.8

Let’s start with this one:

. . . which shows that writers were already engaging with the idea of machines interfacing with human brains in late Victorian times. Bellamy was among the first wave of French/British sci-fi writers, between Jules Verne [Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1872) and H. G. Wells9 (The Time Machine (1895)]. Bellamy is much better known for his 1888 utopian novel, Looking Back. We might call this steam punk today.

Marketed as a thriller, but consistently praised for its writerly finesse and intellectual engagement. It was a New York Times Science Fiction Novel of 2022. New technology lets people edit or (as in Spotless Mind) erase painful memories, raising contradictions and skeins of unintended consequences. But Harkin delves more into the nature of memory itself, what it is, than you’d expect in a thriller. The language in review after review sounds like this:

  • “ . . . intellectually and emotionally satisfying.” [Booklist]

  • “Sharply, beautifully written.” [New York Times Book Review]

  • “Intriguing, frightening, witty, and humane.” [The Wall Street Journal]

[Here’s more from Crime Reads: “Six Books About the Perils of Memory Manipulation.”]

Memoroxin, a new Alzheimer’s therapy, becomes a go-to recreational drug among LA’s young elite. Complications ensue. A couple meet (both seeking treatment for “Mem” abuse), sense a glimmer of connection—did they know each other “before”?

From Publisher’s Weekly:

. . . a tight tale of relationships and loneliness in a city populated by people always on the hunt for the next big escape. It’s a captivating story, one that leaves readers wondering if a life scrubbed of pain and real connection is a life at all.

Crouch is becoming known for edgy speculative thrillers. Recursion won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Responding to the tendency of mainstream readers to disregard novels with paranormal elements, the New York Times reviewer wrote:

  • I believe they capture the disquiet of millions; they broadcast at an anxious frequency. The sense that our country’s center is not holding pulses through the novel. The fear that we are losing our collective memory, of a stable nation for instance, doesn’t read to me like fantasy.

7. Tyranny: Wiping the Public Mind

When the MAGA coup installed the current junta in the White House, we immediately saw the roll-out of two classic totalitarian tactics—both were presaged by Orwell [Animal Farm (1945), 1984 (1949)] and Bradbury [Fahrenheit 451 (1953)]:

  • gaslighting/re-naming

  • undocumenting

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives designed to address systemic racism and bigotry were cancelled in the name of Justice (“treating everyone equally”). In public spaces (National Parks, the Smithsonian Museums, etc.) references to slavery, Black achievement, queer history, and myriad other facts inconsistent with the false narrative pushed by the regime are removed. If it’s not in the record, it never happened.

Whether we weather this perversion of historical truth is an open question. [For many current Americans there’s precious little historical knowledge to pervert.] Oh, friends, I feel a rant coming on. Much as I’d like to squirt lighter fluid on it, I’m now reminding myself that writing these posts is an exercise in mental health management.

So I’ll simply say that memory suppression initiated and enforced by the state is a special case within Remembering/Forgetting literature, one that needs more time and space than there’s room for today.


8. Addendum to Remembering [1]: Two More Amnesia Books

This one is a memoir. Hodge and her younger sister, Candy, live with dysfunctional/substance-abusing parents. Though Hodge has promised to protect Candy, she dies from a viral infection while still a child. Hodge finds she cannot remember her sister or her death; overcoming that failure becomes the center of story.

A bestseller. Rave reviews from major papers across the U.S. From Wiki: . . . a psychological thriller about a woman suffering from anterograde amnesia. She wakes up every day with no knowledge of who she is. The novel follows her as she tries to reconstruct her memories from a journal she has been keeping. She learns that she has been seeing a doctor who is helping her to recover her memory, that her name is Christine Lucas, that she is 47 years old and married and has a son. As her journal grows it casts doubts on the truth behind this knowledge as she determines to discover who she really is.

Note:

Apologies for relying on media sources for much of today’s post—I’ve read only a couple of these [Time’s Arrow, Recursion] so far. Will definitely read Time Shelter before summer.

Please add to both the Memory Book posts in the comments—I’ve tried to skip over the strictly genre/lit-lite examples, but you may know other good ones—I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface.

See you on 16 March.

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Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve done 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

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1

Slipstream: See Reading Project [19].

By the way: Aren’t Andrea Kowch’s paintings a gas!

2

Physics?: I was never a science guy in school, but later I came to realize I was a materialist—a lover of stuff and a non-believer. I gradually acquired a kind of Buddhist view of things—Buddhism not as a “religion” but as a description of how the mind functions. Anyway, in mid-life I began reading physics books, now and then, ones written by practicing physicists for a general audience. If asked why, I usually say, Because I’m interested in what is. Part of the time, people know what I mean by that.

One thing I learned: that “reality” depends on scale. In our macro world, things follow the rules of cause and effect (otherwise known as Newtonian or classical physics). But at the atomic/subatomic scale, you need a different physics—quantum* mechanics. At this scale you can’t say what will happen next, only what the odds of its happening are. In short: our world/cause and effect, subatomic world/probability.

*This term quantum [plural, quanta] comes from the idea that matter is ultimately granular, that, for instance, an electron can exist only at discrete energy levels. Which means: when it changes energy levels it doesn’t migrate/flow/amble, it jumps to/materializes on the next “shelf.”

3

The Memory Collectors: From LitHub:

Similar idea: Toshikazu Kawaguchi has a series of short novels, Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series (beginning with a novel of that title, 2015)—a bit of the blurb:

  • In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

4

Remainder: This is a novel I know I read, but remember not. Reading the description of it for this post, it sounded intriguing and I had to wonder why it had vanished from my gray matter. Well, that happens. I’m going to give it another shot.

Two of his other books, C (2010) and Satin Island (2015) were shortlisted for the Book/Man Book Prize.

5

Betrayal: An affair. A literary agent, his wife, and a writer. The first scene we see is the final parting of the lovers, everything at an end; the last one we see is the instant they first lock eyes at a Christmas party—they know nothing about what’s ahead of them, but we do. The poignancy is staggering. Is it a gimmick? Not if it works.

And just now I remembered The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which has within it, a reversal of ordinary time flow.

6

Kim Stanley Robinson: A master of contemporary sci-fi (and more recently, cli-fi) whose expertise extends into the science. I’m a fan of his 2020 novel, The Ministry For the Future—it has a grimly unforgettable opening, but it ultimately a hopeful book (need I say how rare a commodity that is in this genre?).

7

Alternate History lists:

8

Spotless Mind:

9

Wells: Modern readers tend to forget that Wells wrote “straight” novels (many comic) as well including:

  • The History of Mr. Polly (1910)

  • Ann Veronica (1909) [a “New Woman” novel]

  • Tono-Bungay (1909) [sketchy uncle, patent medicine]

  • Kipps (1905)

]]><![CDATA[Remembering: Novels about Memory [1]]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/remembering-novels-about-memory-1https://longd.substack.com/p/remembering-novels-about-memory-1Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:03:39 GMT
New subscribers & followers, Welcome! I promise not to waste your time.

—from Remembering Plains series, Alyson Kinkade
[https://www.alysonkinkade.com]

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Note [a]: Please click through to the Substack site (i.e. don’t read from email notification). Why? It will make me happy to know you’re seeing posts the way I put them up. And they’re best read on tablet or laptop.
Note [b]: OK, this is difficult to write: It’s come to my attention that several of you are skipping the footnotes. I know, I know, hard to believe . . . because that’s where the juicy stuff is, you know? The nuggets of back story and whatnot, the1

Remembering:

1. . . . she purrs like a kitten ′til the lake pipes roar

At some point in my extensive married life, I realized that “memory” was actually a constellation of phenomena. My esteemed spouse remembers what she wore in the fourth grade. She remembers which summers we went where and with whom. I remember being dog tired and passing No Vacancy sign after No Vacancy sign somewhere in the guts of northern Minnesota, a cranky preschooler in the back—I could work out a time range from that last item (if in fact it was one cranky preschooler and not one cranky preschooler plus one red-headed third-grader)2 . . . you see where I’m going with this. For me, events float untethered in time. Yet I can conjure up every inch of the house I lived in from 1952 to 1966; ditto the school buildings I spent my days in. I can name Dickens’ novels and most of Zola’s 20-book Les Rougon-Macquart. I can tell you the birth names of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, the lyrics of “Little Deuce Coupe,” and most of the theme song of Dick Summer’s Night Life radio show on WBZ [One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, four Limerick oysters, five corpulent porpoises, etc.]3

Anyway, today were looking at how novelists use the element of “memory.”

The whole business of reading and writing is saturated by remembering. The writer remembers an incident or dream or scrap from media; into the writing it goes4 —straight/complete, or a snippet, or a funhouse-mirror version. Sometimes the story is about remembering, sometimes the writer is using fiction to ferret out the truth of personal experience, because doing it via memoir is too painful/too self-exposing/too hurtful to others. Sometimes the disguise isn’t meant to fool anyone, but to avoid lawsuits, etc. Once in a while, a writer tries it both ways.5

Many years ago, reading one of Milan Kundera’s essays on writing, I was gobsmacked by this statement:

  • Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.6

This explains why media depictions of, say, the 1960s, always get it wrong. They show the costumes, the iconic photos, the lingo, the peace signs. But you had to be there to get it—the vibe, the hierarchy of values, what a given object meant, besides which “the 1960s” was a wildly heterogeneous jumble of subcultures—who, exactly, are you talking about? But back to Kundera, and what I think he means: That the moment you commit a particle of life to memory you trigger the process of forgetting almost all the rest—the off-to-the-side details, the build-up, the nuance, and so on.

The moment you commit a particle of life to memory you trigger the process of forgetting

A few posts ago, I cited two memory-based novels (one I love, one I admire) that use a common strategy—William Maxwell’s, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s, Eileen (2015). Let’s start our taxonomy there. Both novels are told in first-person. Maxwell’s begins with an old man’s memory of a murder that happened when he was a boy, a farmer shot by his neighbor, and the reason he’s never forgotten it. Moshfegh’s begins with an older woman’s cold-eyed depiction of herself as a drab young woman. [More on how this design operates here.7]

So this is the first sort of “memory novel”—a character (or outside narrator) presents a set of events from an earlier plane of their (or the character’s) life; they’re remembered because they’re significant. You might argue that all past-tense novels do this, but in the ones here remembering is a catalyst. Maxwell’s narrator has been haunted by a small act of omission he committed a lifetime ago—finally, he must tell us about it, and about his not forgetting it.

Moshfegh could’ve written her novel in straight third-person—indeed, the distance between her two selves almost seems like the distance between strangers. The younger Eileen is unhappy, trapped-feeling, ripe for manipulation. We’re told almost nothing about the older Eileen’s circumstances, but in her voice we hear the disdain for her younger self, as well as her staunch unwillingness to look back through rose-colored glasses.8

2. Loss of Memory:

Last week I read about 80-year-old Samuel A. Simon—a former lawyer who worked for Ralph Nader—who performs a one-man show about losing his marbles: Dementia Man: An Existential Journey. God, what courage, I thought. Here’s a link to the Washington Post story I read. [Have a look.]

For those in my cohort, the loss of marbles is the monster under the bed. Film and literature show us what it looks like from the outside, how vexing it is to manage our Alzheimer’s-afflicted elders or partners—for instance, The Father (2020), with Anthony Hopkins, and Iris (1998), John Bayley’s horrifying account of his wife (the acclaimed novelist Dame Iris Murdock) descending into dementia.9

Many of us have seen people we love suffer this fate and find ourselves trying to imagine it from the inside; this entity you’ve known for so long, the self— your pal, your tormenter, your archivist—turning its back on you and leaving, step by quiet step.

Read about consciousness and you’ll come across the line: Mind is what brain does. If, like me, you view consciousness as an emergent state (like a hologram), that pithy statement feels correct. But it asks you to view memory as an assemblage of biochemical transactions . . . not so different from the Jumbotron’s replay of your favorite outfielder’s homerun-denying leap above the centerfield wall: if x-number of its pixels go dark, it’s only a senseless smattering of lighted dots.

Novelists have tackled memory loss from a slew of angles. Many are straight literary realism (like Maxwell’s and Moshfegh’s novels). They’re about memory eroded by age/illness. The good ones work because their detail is keen and unexpected, their sentences are smart and have a voice; despite Alzheimer’s being increasingly familiar as a subject, we’re still moved by them.

Here are four:

Writers at the thriller-y end of the spectrum favor “amnesia”—sudden memory loss from violent accident or psychic trauma (or whatever). The Who Am I? plot, the Who Is She Really? plot. Amnesia comes with a sackful of subspecies—Can’t remember anything before [point in time], can’t remember anything after [point in time], etc. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. One Goodreads list of books with amnesia has 837 titles.11 And let’s not forget Christopher Nolan’s twisty film Memento (2000).12 A character suffers from severe short-term memory loss (can make no new memories, tries to cope by leaving himself a string of notes and photos, even tattoos). What could possibly go wrong?

Or the Bourne films, adapted from Robert Ludlum’s, The Bourne Trilogy (1980-1990).

In Remembering, Part Two [2 March], we’ll dive into how meta/speculative fiction writers have used memory loss/memory recovery and related ideas in their work. For now, here are two amnesia novels that are a bridge to that post:

  • Noah’s Compass, Anne Tyler (2011)13

  • The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa (1994). Trans. from Japanese by Stephen Snyder (2019). This was one of my 2020 top-five reads. It’s better if you go into it cold—not that there’s a shocking reveal, but the mood is uncanny/normal-but-strange; it settles over you like a mist. The nutshell: People in an island community have their memories/knowledge of things erased by the Memory Police, one at a time—ribbons, scents, birds, harmonicas, novels, body parts, and so on.14 Here’s the Booker page.

3. When Memory Fails:

Sometimes it’s not the capacity to remember that’s lost, but its accuracy, its trustworthiness. Time can degrade memories, memories can warp under pressure, or become entangled in unrelated thoughts. We can be tricked into certainty by our own psyches, our preconceptions/prejudices, our own conscious and unconscious needs. We can even confuse our partner’s memories with our own.15

For centuries, the identification of suspects by eye witnesses was a backbone of criminal justice—it seemed rational, and much of the time it worked. But n recent years, new forensic tools and evidence-based studies have thrown a harsh light on the frequency of wrongful conviction due to misidentification. My own eyes were opened to the scale of this injustice by a powerfully appalling work by lawyer Barry Scheck (and co-authors), Actual Innocence (2000). Scheck was a driving force behind The Innocence Project. I don’t have room to expound on their work here, but you should take a moment to look at their data:

One of the most masterful recent novels about the impact of wrongful incarceration is Tayari Jones’, An American Marriage (2018).16

We love stories of exoneration, especially those like To Kill a Mockingbird, where a Black man is redeemed. We know it’s a fable, we know that for every courtroom with an Atticus Finch, there were a hundred lacking one. We know that racism attaches to a great many misidentifications—whether conscious bigotry or the bias that keeps us from locking in the distinguishing features of races other than our own, or the fact that so many of the accused are represented by harried overloaded public defenders.

Working on this post, I turned up a slew of good booklists relating to wrongful conviction (not all rely on flawed memory). Here’s one from The Innocence Project—all books written by exonerated prisoners:

And another from Jessica Henry, former public prosecutor, now a writer, professor and podcaster:

A catalog of nonfiction works from Celadon Books:

One from the Electric Literature’s site:

  • https://electricliterature.com/8-books-that-question-the-reliability-of-memory/

And one devoted to thrillers:

4. And finally . . .

Well, I intended to wrap up today’s post with a look at the pseudo-science of “repressed memory therapy”—the practice of coaxing stories of childhood sexual abuse from patients. For a time, starting in 1980s, the psych world was awash in these accounts. Some were true, many weren’t. Eventually, the sketchiness of the methodology became obvious and the hysteria passed; in the meantime lives were ruined.

As it turned out, having been unable to avoid the news lately, my sexual-abuse-of- children compartment was already way over-stuffed. If you’d like to recommend a novel devoted to this subject, feel free to stick it in the comments. For now, I’ll leave you with a short list of nonfiction works:

  • Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die, Mark Pendergrast (2021)

  • The Truth about False Memory Syndrome Paperback, James G. Friesen (2019)

  • The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus (1996)

Portrait of writer Baldassare Castiglioni (The Book of the Courtier) by Raphael

Years ago, in a class on the art of the High Italian Renaissance, I ran into a paradigm that’s stuck with me—as follows: By the early 1500s, generations of artists had gradually refined the art of oil painting, leading to the era of Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and others, a period of sublime portraiture. But the next wave of artists faced a problem: What next? What do you do in the wake of our elders’ perfection? The answer was Mannerism, an art movement that went beyond the bounds of realism—garish colors appeared, exaggerated/elongated limbs, extreme perspectives (the prone body of the dead Jesus seen end on, from the bottom of the feet, the rest of the figure barely visible).

So, the paradigm: art mining rich veins until the run out, then veering off, beginning new veins. Over and over and over. I was thinking of this because (except for The Memory Police) today’s examples operate in the real world. Part Two’s writers veer off. They all seem to be asking: What else can we do?

OK, see you in two weeks.

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Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve done 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

1

the: That wasn’t so hard, was it?

2

No Vacancy: It was the summer of 1979, I am now informed (esteemed spouse), “the day before the car broke down” (that, I do remember, though not that it happened on the same trip). Plus, I was taking a bit of writer’s license—the kid in back was the red-headed one, three years old, and, really, a good traveler. Tomorrow is his fiftieth birthday. [PS: we finally got a room.]

3

Dick Summer: Want the rest?

  • Six pairs of Don Alverzo’s tweezers, Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array, Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt, Nine apathetic sympathetic diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity to procrastination and sloth, Ten lyrical spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who haul stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the queasy at the very same time.

Apparently this was on old radio announcer’s warmup exercise. Anyway, Dick Summer was one of the early hints I got that the world contained some splendid wackiness. Also, his show was my first experience of Eric Clapton-esque soloing, before which guitar solos sounded like what you heard on “Louie Louie.” Not to gainsay “Louie Louie,” but this was seismic, this was like the Dark Ages giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.

4

Into the writing it goes: John Lennon’s half of “A Day in the Life” began with a report in The Daily Mail of a Guiness heir’s death in a car crash; he mashed it up with a different day’s story about potholes that needed filling in Blackburn, Lancashire.

In a recent post I talked about not writing autobiography—that is, not telling my story. Yet you have to get down the page; bits of your experience find their way in. When I was writing a scene in the short story “Morphine”—a married doctor, half-drunk, drives his Buick around on a frozen oxbow, “cutting donuts” for the benefit of his “younger lady friend”—I remembered the afternoon we’d skated on Church Slough, south of Kalispell. The surface of the ice was usually snow-crusted, but that day it was bare, the ice hard and glassy; as we glided along a muskrat swam beneath us, matching our pace, air bubbles trailing out behind; finally it disappeared into a den in the bank.

Into the story it went.

5

Both ways: There’s the case of Kathryn Harrison. Her first two novels treated father/daughter incest [the daughter was not a child I need to point out]; they were well-reviewed but didn’t sell like hotcakes. Later, she published The Kiss: A Memoir (1997), which laid out the details of her affair with her father, and it set off fireworks. She was praised in the Times Book Review by Susan Cheever, but savaged elsewhere. The severity of the reaction became its own story; Mary Karr unfolded this flap in the Art of the Memoir (“The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison”).

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Harrison

[On the off-chance one or two of you don’t already know this, the Frenchies call a novel with thinly veiled depictions of real people, a roman à clef.]

6

Kundera: “Á la Recherche du Présent Perdu,” in Testaments Betrayed (1993), trans. from French by Linda Asher (1995). Kundera often did that to me.

[Note, esteemed spouse hates it when I use the word gobsmacked. Pretentious, she feels, an affectation. I’ll give her that. Then again, I’ve become an Anglophile in my dotage, and, really, isn’t it a terrific word? My gob has been smacked! But I promise not to use it again in today’s post, OK?]

7

Story design:

Telling a story from much later, you have to decide which POV to stress, the now of the telling (which emphasizes how the narrator’s grasp of past events has evolved over time) or the immediate aftermath (when there’s more confusion, when the details and their meaning are still being sorted).

You also have to decide how present the narrator-as-much-older-person will be. Such a narrator can keep stepping in, reminding us of the gap between then and now. Or the opposite: establish that it’s a looking-back story, then disappear until, perhaps, the end (which makes it a frame story). Or—a common variation—insert the older voice just often enough to remind us that the story has two planes. I remember using this example in an earlier post, but the film Little Big Man has Jack Crabbe, the 121-year-old last survivor of the Battle of the Little Horn, telling his story to an interviewer, but except for the very beginning and the very end we see LBM as a young man, the occasional crackly voice-over reminding us of the frame.

Interestingly, The Usual Suspects does the reverse: the story’s kick-in-the-pants comes from the fact that although we know everything we’re seeing is actually a story being told by a character, we forget, setting up one of all-time twistiest movie endings—tight shot of a man’s legs as he walks down the sidewalk, limping, pigeon-toed a few steps then all at once breaking into a normal gait. Cryptic, I realize, if you don‘t know the film, but hasn’t everyone seen it at least once??

8

Eileen: Moshfegh is a master of voice. A later novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) pulls off a marvelous stunt: Her character’s quest is to knock herself out for a year, via drugs she gets from her shrink (that relationship is broad satire, a hoot . . . if you let yourself laugh); in between her sleeps, she abuses her one good-hearted schlub of a friend. You wouldn’t like this narrator, but you watch her gleefully. The better angels of many readers will keep them from appreciating this one. My advice: listen to your lesser angel. Then there’s her early novella, McGlue (2014). I dare you.

9

Iris: Jim Broadbent won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for portraying Bayley in the 2001 film adaptation. I’ve never read Murdoch. I should.

10

Samatha Harvey: Are you wondering why the name’s familiar? She won the 2024 Booker for her slender novel, Orbital, which imagines a 24-hour span aboard the ISS.

11

Goodreads: The principal cause of amnesia in fiction is the dread Needaplot Syndrome.

12

Memento: Adapted from a short story by his brother, Jonathan Nolan.

13

Noah’s Compass: I have yet to read this one. Anne Tyler was a catalyst for me when I was a young fiction writer, especially Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982). Click on the link and you’ll see what Bookshop.org says about it. I confess that I sometimes buy other stuff from Amazon, but never books. Bookshop.org is the go-to—they donate $$$ to indie bookstores; I also get books from the Elliott Bay Book Company.

14

The Memory Police: Is it allegorical? Of course, but below the surface—like some of the best speculative lit, you settle into this world the way you do with any good literary novel. But allegory: I mention this because it touches on a subject I’ve skipped in today’s post, the erasure of a group’s memory: the suppression of language, identity, and cultural expression by the Powers That Be—it deserves far more attention than I can give it today and will have to wait for another time.

And here’s a fantasy novel by Peng Sheperd that also deals with memory loss spreading through a group, The Book of M (2018).

15

Our partner’s memories: As recently as this week, esteemed spouse said: Uh uh, you weren’t there. I told you about it. Me: Oh.

16

An American Marriage: Sample the rave reviews at LitHub.

]]><![CDATA[Novels About Old Books ]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/novels-about-old-bookshttps://longd.substack.com/p/novels-about-old-booksMon, 02 Feb 2026 16:57:33 GMT

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Reminder About Footnotes:
All listed books are now hyperlinked to pages that give you some basic intel. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/wry, razor-sharp commentary from the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future posts for a while.

1. The Weight of Ink, Possession:

First, thanks to DL2 loyalist, Larry Feign, for pointing me toward The Weight of Ink.

Like many of you, I’m a fan of really good skinny reads [see lists1], but Kadish’s novel (706 pp.) is a good example of a book with heft/gravitas that doesn’t feel over-long—it avoids unwarranted side-trips or asking us to track a menagerie of minor players, nor is it in need of one more zealous edit.2 It felt, instead, full, serious/philosophical, but not (despite the title) heavy.

It’s a story with two time frames: now (documents from the early days of London’s Jewish community turn up when an historic house is renovated), and the late 1600s when they were written. The now characters want to uncover the nature of the documents—who wrote them, why, how they illuminate the larger story of the Jewish diaspora (these were Sephardic Jews, Portuguese, by way of Amsterdam)—but also ascertain their value in both the marketplace and their potential for scholarly advancement.

It’s essentially a novel of ideas, yet the embedded problem-solving (as well as friction between the two foreground characters) makes the story forward-leaning—the characters’ curiosity generates our own.

Right away, I was reminded of A. S. Byatt’s, Possession (1991).3 I got to wondering what other novels share this design—stories in which characters are caught up in deciphering/tracking down/identifying the authorship and/or meaning of earlier books (or documents or other kinds of old text4), and especially ones that switch back and forth between planes of time as Kadish and Byatt do.

2.

As a young writer, I believed writers should write about the world. I mean, duh.

Shoot me, I remember telling my significant other, if you ever catch me writing about a writer writing a book, or—god, help me—about the tortured life of a creative writing teacher.

I still kind of believe that.

Yet, I remember this anecdote in Annie Dillard’s, The Writing Life:5

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”

“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint.”

Painters love paint, and the tools of art-making, and art spaces—studios, museums, galleries, etc. Writers love words (especially when set in type). For writers, books are wells of space-time around which they orbit.6 Every writer I know loves to hang out where books hang out—bookshops, libraries, archives, and so on. [One Goodreads list, Books about Books and Libraries, has 827 titles.]

3.

As usual, today’s post began with my reading, but this time I’ve read only the two already mentioned. The rest I’ve curated from here and there.

Clicking on the titles will take you to intel from Wiki, LitHub, or elsewhere. Since the WPTS7 is to put you in touch of books you don’t already know (so we don’t all read the same twelve best-marketed novels, so we profit from each other’s finds, so our ideas about the art of novel-making become less provincial), I encourage you to take a few minutes to check out these titles. Some will seem skippable (or to say it elsewise, you’ll see you’re not the ideal reader for some). But among the others one or two will likely give you that Oh, yeah, this one— feeling.

Three questions to think about as you work through today’s list:

  • If you’re a writer, do you accept what I said above about having an inbred (almost physiological) attraction to the stuff of writing—paper/words in print/book spaces (and book times) as sanctuaries? Would you go as far as Saul Bellow, who said: A writer is a reader moved to emulation?8 In short, are you convinced that reading books from a young age is what led you to the lip of your personal luge track, where the slightest touch, the lightest breath of wind at your back sent you hurtling?

  • Do you think the Someone finds an old book/document/artifact, gets sucked in by its mystery, eventually untangles it/is illuminated by it plot is too formulaic, or too familiar/predictable/overdone? Or, contrariwise, because you yourself love books and secret backstories and solving puzzles and reading about how writers’ minds work, is this a non-issue for you . . . because, after all, don’t some readers read one romance after another, or one whodunit/gumshoe novel after another? Or because some plots are infinitely recyclable?

  • I’m not well satisfied with today’s list and I think you can help improve it. Experience has taught me how reticent nearly all of you are to interact with DL2; nonetheless, I’d love to know what nifty examples I’ve missed. Prepping this post, I ran across various lists of novels of this kind, but many of the titles seemed to reside at the beach-read/lit-lite end of the spectrum.9 Do you know of literary novels that should grace this collection of titles? Literary: smart, good sentences, fresh-seeming? Tell the rest of us! Comment below.

[Additionally: If you’ve read any of the ones below, what did you think of them?]

4. A Baker’s Dozen:

Note 1: Some of these focus on novels with two timelines, some on books inspired by other books. We’re trying to check both boxes today, but some of those below may qualify. Worth a look.

Note 2: Wording my search terms was tricky this time. A bunch of How to Find Old Books When You’ve Forgotten the Title results also showed up. Not that any of you need such help, but I included a couple anyway.

  • https://www.meetnewbooks.com/suggest-book/62939/The-Weight-of-Ink- Rachel-Kadish

  • https://bookriot.com/books-about-book/

  • https://redwing.lib.mn.us/20-great-dual-timeline-novels/

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/ymevaq/ novels_involving_ancient_mysteries_and_manuscripts/

  • https://crimereads.com/7-great-mysteries-about-rare-books-and-bibliophiles/

  • https://guides.loc.gov/lost-titles-forgotten-rhymes/finding-novels

  • https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/724/Name-that-Book

  • https://myreadingvintage.com/blogs/vintage-book-addicts-blog-reading-vintage/ old-book-look-up-a-comprehensive-guide

  • https://curiousmindcafe.com/discovering-the-past-the-joy-of-reading-old-books/

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Reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business:
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve done 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980 // 1978, 1973, 1971 // 1969, 1966, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1961, 1960 // 1959, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1952, 1951, 1950 // 1948, 1946, 1945, 1944 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

Oh, and . . .

1

Good skinny novels: In the early days of this Substack, I did two posts on these:

The first has a long list of skinny-novel picks. The other has a breakdown of their narrative strategies/designs.

2

Zealous edit: Novels can always be shrunk. Cut the extra stuff . . . we tell students, but don’t get into the particulars deeply enough. You can take any page of prose and cut ten percent of the words and no one will know you did it. What about 20 percent? Here’s an exercise: Take any piece of writing and make it roughly a third shorter. Then do it again. You’ll notice it starts to morph into a different thing—for instance, a regular short story can begin to sound like flash fiction because of what (in film) are called jump cuts, the compaction, the lack of larger context, etc. The point of this exercise it to see how much faster you can make the writing move before it stops being what it is or feels underwritten or sounds like a telegram. [Does anyone remember what telegrams sound like?]

In any case, here’s some of the advice I give to myself:

  • Say it once and move on. If you trust the meaning of your the words, you won’t keep trying to gild the lily (as my father would say)—adding, adding, adding because you’re afraid you haven’t made your point yet.

  • Say it efficiently, relying more on nouns and verbs, less on the verb to be, baggy/indirect constructions, convoluted that/which clauses., qualifiers, etc.

  • Don’t say what doesn’t need saying—what’s implicit, what people already know.

[Finally, every time I’ve had to shorten a story significantly I later put back a few things, but the otherwise kept the streamlined version.]

3

Possession: Winner of 1990 Booker Prize.

4

Old Text: Though this takes us offtrack, the mystery might be in deciphering the language of the text. I really liked Edward Dolnick’s nonfiction, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone (2021).

[And though I can’t imagine this applies to any of you, if you’ve never been snagged by the Voynich Manuscript controversy, have a peek.]

5

Dillard: You might remember this from one of last year’s posts.

6

Orbit: Though, on occasion, writers’ spouses have called this “circling the drain.”

7

WPTS: The Whole Point of This Substack.

8

A writer is a reader moved to emulation: For me, reading caused the writing. And not just reading the books, but reading about the books and the writers—I wanted in on that, I wanted that to be my tribe.

But there’s another aspect of this: If you’re someone (like me) who believes your personal experience isn’t (how to say it?) the stuff of art, you can still write, just non-autobiographically. (But having taken that fork in the road—that is, writing away from self—you might find your prose studded with details/images/bits of happenstance from your real, day-to-day life.)

9

Lit lite: I need to unpack this a little. Yes, I’m a book snob. Yes, I champion great art. But lots of non-high-art novels are good reads; we don’t need a steady diet of Crime and Punishments (full disclosure: I never finished that one, or for that matter The Brothers K.—maybe you need to read Dostoevsky at a time in your life when bleak philosophizing seems cool). My taste bounces around—I can read Portrait of a Lady one week and Get Shorty the next. I like speculative novels (especially cli-fi or time-fracturing stories), but also ordinary-life stuff—Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett . . . Last month I happpily engaged with Catherine Newman’s, Sandwich (2024), domestic fiction—family vacation, people who love each other, no murders, no kink, no time travel. There’s a sequel, Wreck; I’ll probably read that one, too.

]]><![CDATA[What Can I Say?]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/what-can-i-sayhttps://longd.substack.com/p/what-can-i-saySun, 25 Jan 2026 22:51:16 GMT
Be back in a few days . . .
]]><![CDATA[Reading Project [26]: The International Booker]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-project-26-the-internationalhttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-project-26-the-internationalTue, 13 Jan 2026 00:47:42 GMT

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2026: Some thoughts on this Substack:

First of all, welcome to new subscribers and followers. This spring, we’ll start into Year Three. I try to put up a full post every second Monday. Since retiring from teaching and writing fiction, this work is what I do to feel useful. I’m older than most of you, and perhaps keener on keeping older/less-well-known books from joining the ranks of the Never-Again-Read. [If you’re a follower, you might as well subscribe since it’s free, then I’ll feel even more useful.]

Second, like some of you, I see book influencers on Instagram almost daily. Most are serious/seriously prolific readers—the ones I follow recommend titles I’d recommend. Some give you a sense of why the book’s worth your attention, but the titles flash by and a lot of the commentary is along the lines of, This one’s really awesome, you oughta read it! Perfect for an audience of scrollers, flick, flick, flick.

That’s not how David’s Lists 2.0 works. My posts take an investment of time (from me, then you). Why so few of you comment or click on links or read the footnotes has less to do with me boring the bejesus out of you (or so I fervently hope) than with the way the posts are read—on the fly, on your phone, just one item in a cornucopia of dopamine rushes. As always, I encourage you to click through to the Substack site, read the posts in a quiet moment, on tablet or laptop. I’ve come to know how dinosaurish these sentiments sound; I offer them anyway. Much as I admire the Instagramers who share their love of solid literary fiction, I can’t bring myself to do the This one’s awesome, so is this one, and wow so’s this one . . . kind of post.

If you’re simpatico with what we do here, I’d really appreciate it if you’d talk a like-minded friend into subscribing.

Finally, today’s post is a companion to one from last April, Reading Projects [20]: Booker. A few books from that post also appear here, but today’s post is focused on the International Prize for the most-recent 8-year period.

***Important Update About Footnotes:

All books now have a hotlink you can click on—sometimes to Wiki, sometimes to another source. I hope you’ll check them out since putting you in touch with books you don’t know is pretty much the whole point of this Substack. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck.

About the International Booker Prize:

The main Booker Prize (for writing originally in English) is complemented by the International Booker (for writing translated into English). A bit more background on these prizes here.1

Between 2018 and 2025, there were 104 titles nominated. Find the complete list here, along with the translators and presses (I was encouraged by the number of small/independent presses represented).

I’ve picked out two dozen for today’s post.

1. Eight I’ve Read and Vouch For:

Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck (2022). Trans. from German by Michael Hoffman (Granta Books). 2024 Winner. [Germany] 2

Boulder, Eva Baltasar (2020). Trans. from Catalan by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories). 2023 Shortlist. [Spain] 3

Whale, Cheon Myeong-kwan (2004). Trans. from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Archipelago Books). 2023 Shortlist. [South Korea]

Elena Knows, Claudia Piñeiro (2007) Trans. by Frances Riddle (Charco Press). 2022 Shortlist. [Argentina]

When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (2021). Trans. by Adrian Nathan West (Pushkin Press). 2021 Shortlist. [Chile]

The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa (1994) Trans. by Stephen Snyder (Pantheon). Shortlist 2020. [Japan]

The Eighth Life, Nino Haratischvili (2014). Trans. from German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (Scribe). 2020 Longlist. [Georgia]

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk (2007). Trans. by Jennifer Croft (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 2018 Winner [Poland]

2. Eight I Haven’t Read But Know Enough About to Make Me Want To:

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, Banu Mushtaq. Trans. from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories). 2025 winner. [India]

Lost on Me, Veronica Raimo (2022). Trans. from Italian by Leah Janeczko (Virago Press) 2024 Longlist. [Italy]

Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov (2020). Trans. from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 2023 winner. [Bulgaria]

Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree (2018). Trans. from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press). 2022 winner. [India]

At Night All Blood Is Black, David Diop (2018). Trans. from French by France Anna Moschovakis (Pushkin Press). 2021 Winner. [France]

The Discomfort of Evening, Lucas Rijneveld (2018). Trans. from Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Faber and Faber). 2020 winner. [Netherlands]

Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi (2010). Trans. from Arabic by Marilyn Booth (Sandstone Press). 2019 winner. [Oman]

The Years [autobiography], Annie Ernaux (2008) Trans. from French by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press). 2019 Shortlist. [France]

Die, My Love, Ariana Harwicz (2012). Trans. from Spanish by Sara Moses and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). 2018 Longlist. [Argentina]4


3. Eight More:

Eurotrash, Christian Kracht (2021). Trans. from German by Daniel Bowles (Serpent’s Tail). 2025 Longlist. [Switzerland]

The Details, Ia Genberg (2022). Trans. from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Wildfire Books). 2024 Shortlist. [Sweden]

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, Andrey Kurkov Trans. from Russian by Reuben Woolley (MacLehose Press). 2023 Longlist. [Ukraine]

An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky (2018). Trans. from German by Jackie Smith (MacLehose Press). 2021 Longlist. [Germany]

Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (2017). Trans. from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (New Direction). 2020 Shortlist. [Mexico]5

The Shape of the Ruins, Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2018). Trans. from Spanish by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press). 2018 Longlist. [Colombia]

Vernon Subutex 1, Virginie Despentes (2015). Trans. from French by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press). 2018 Shortlist. [France]

The White Book, Han Kang (2016). Trans. from Korean by Deborah Smith (Portobello Books). 2018 Shortlist. [South Korea]6

[Note: I picked these last eight by poking about at the Booker site—Maybe

I’d read another book by the writer (Vásquez, Kurkov), already had one on my TBR list (Melchor), knew the writer had won a major prize (Kang), simply dug the title (Eurotrash,) or remembered checking out the writer in the past (Despentes) . . . but that’s just me—if you poke about, you’ll turn up others.]

The Project/Challenge:

a) All the books in today’s post are clickable. So click on some—ones you’ve heard of, ones you haven’t. Tweak your curiosity (bearing in mind that the point of this entire enterprise is connecting you with books you’d otherwise not know or consider reading).

b) Promise yourself you’ll read (at least) one of these 24 books (or any others from the Booker site) every two months during 2026, a total of six; one must be from a country you’ve never read a book from.7

c) Extra Credit: Promise you’ll dive a little deeper into at least one of these writers and read another of their works.

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1

Statement from International Booker site:

The Booker Prizes exist to reward the finest in fiction. The symmetrical relationship between the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize ensures that the Booker honours fiction on a global basis: world-class fiction is highlighted by the prizes for English-speaking readers, whether that work was originally written in English (the Booker Prize) or translated into English (the International Booker Prize).

The International Booker Prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize. It was initially a biennial prize for a body of work, and there was no stipulation that the work should be written in a language other than English. Early winners of the Man Booker International Prize therefore include Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and Philip Roth, as well as Ismail Kadare and László Krasznahorkai.

In 2015, after the rules of the original Booker Prize expanded to allow writers of any nationality to enter – as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK – the International Prize evolved to become the mirror image of the English-language prize. Since then it has been awarded annually for a single book, written in another language and translated into English.

The Man Group continued to sponsor both prizes until 2019, when Crankstart became the funder, and the prize names reverted to the familiar ‘Booker’ name alone.

This prize aims to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world, and has already had an impact on those statistics in the UK. Novels and collections of short stories are both eligible.

2

Kairos: See: https://longd.substack.com/p/my-summer-vacation

3

Boulder: See: https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-20-booker

4

Die, My Love: Movie version, 2025 [Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson].

5

Melchor: 2021 Shortlist, Dublin Literary Award. 2020 longlist, National Book Award for Translated Literature.

6

Han Kang: She wrote the widely recognized The Vegetarian (2007). And was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature.

7

Book from country you’ve never sampled: What about Georgia [The Eighth Life] or Ukraine [any of Andrey Kurkov’s novels] or Republic of Congo [Alain Mabanckou, Black Moses (Longlisted 2017 International Booker) or Pakistan [Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (shortlisted 2017 International Booker), or Zimbabwe [Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions or This Mournable Body)?

]]><![CDATA[Birth Year Project: 1973]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1973https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1973Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:03:03 GMT

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You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. To date, we’ve done 27 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1980, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1989 // 1971, 1973, 1978 // 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 // 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959 // 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

***Important Update About Footnotes:

Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.

1973

Bestsellers:

A Sample of World Lit:

Five Other Literary Works of 1951:

Three Special Mentions:

My List:

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  • https://takemeback.to/books/date/1973

1

Susann: Her third novel, following bestsellers Valley of the Dolls (1966) and The Love Machine (1969). She became the first writer in publishing history to have three consecutive #1 novels on the New York Times Best Seller list.

2

Ende: From Wiki:

. . . also known as The Grey Gentlemen or The Men in Grey, is a fantasy novel by Michael Ende, published in 1973. It is about the concept of time and how it is used by humans in modern societies. The book won the German Youth Literature Award in 1974. The full title in German (Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte) translates to Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people.

Ende also wrote The Neverending Story (1979), another widely popular fantasy novel.

3

Kundera: Born in Czechoslovakia, exiled himself to Paris, became a citizen in 1981. Granted citizenship by Czech Republic in 2019. I found his earlier novels The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) consequential in my life as a developing writer. Even more so were two books on writing The Art of the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (1993).

Here’s an example of his thinking (from one of my craft essays):

  • Kundera believes, in fact, that novels are built upon a base of key words. In a later book, Testaments Betrayed, he takes up this idea again. Comparing several translations of a passage from Kafka’s, The Castle, he decries the “synonymizing reflex.” Where Kafka chose the same German words repeatedly, his translators try to “enrich” the vocabulary. “Richness of vocabulary,” Kundera says, “is not a value in itself.”

    • The breadth of the vocabulary depends on the aesthetic intention governing the work. Carlos Fuentes’s vocabulary is nearly dizzying in its richness. But Hemingway’s is extremely narrow. The beauty of Fuentes’ prose is bound up with the richness, the beauty of Hemingway’s with narrowness of vocabulary.

4

Gulag: This is a tome—I’ve never made any headway on it myself. If you want a quick taste of Solzhenitsyn, read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [the 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts (Noonday/Farrar Straus Giroux)]. Solzhenitsyn led a complex life in and out of the Soviet Union—take a look at his Wiki. I have no idea how widely he’s read these days, but he was a major figure in Russian public life for many years.

5

Patrick White: A major figure in Australian lit. I always feel I should’ve read him by now, but I still have not. He’s the only Australian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1973).

6

Amis: Suppose you’re the kid of a really famous novelist, whaddya do? Some join the family business, becoming editors, journalists, memoirists, poets, or novelists . . . little-recognized, widely known, or outstripping Mom or Dad:

  • The Black Tulip, Alexandre Dumas, père (1850) // The Lady of the Camillias, Alexandre Dumas, fils (1848)

  • Domestic Manners of the Americans, Fanny Trollope (1832) // Anthony Trollope [47 novels!]

  • Ending, Hilma Wolitzer (1974) // The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer (2019)

  • Golden Days, Carolyn See (1987) // The Island of Sea Women, Lisa See (2019)

The Rachel Papers was Martin Amis’s first novel. I included in this list because he grew into a major British writer, as famous as his father, Kingsley, who wrote prolifically and was a public figure in England’s literary cosmos—probably best-known for Lucky Jim (1954).

The Rachel Papers got decidedly mixed reviews, though winning the Somerset Maugham Award for best novel by a writer under the age of thirty-five. Later in his career, he soured on it. In 2010 he told the Sunday Times: “A first novel is about energy and originality, but to me now it looks so crude. I don’t mean bad language – it’s so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren’t there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute.”

From Wiki: Amis’s work centres on the excesses of late capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. He was portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called “the new unpleasant-ness.” He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father, Kingsley. Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

My favorite of his many novels is Time’s Arrow (1991). This is what I once said about it in an essay:

  • In Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, a man receives an electric shock, which creates, within him, a doppelganger, a separate consciousness who must now begin to figure out who he’s trapped inside of. Simultaneously, time begins to move backward—each act is seen (thus understood) in reverse. Food is disgorged from mouths, packed into cans, taken to stores. A hand is applied to a woman’s face and instantly she stops weeping (he must be a healer!). We’d soon tire of this device were it not for the compelling thematic reason behind it (I won’t spoil it for you).

7

Crash: From Wiki:

  • The novel received divided reviews when originally published. One publisher’s reader returned the verdict, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” A 1973 review in The New York Times was equally horrified: “Crash is, hands-down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.”

8

Berger: 23 novels, five books of stories.

Blurbage: “Regiment of Women,” for all its exaggeration and grotesque parody, has been imagined with such ferocity and glee that we assent to it almost in spite of ourselves, celebrating with Berger that anarchic individuality that outlasts all the forms that language and society attempt to impose upon it.

9

Fear & Loathing: Thompson was a larger-than-life figure, the epitome of gonzo journalism. What is gonzo journalism? Beginning in the 1960s, traditional journalism was augmented by a movement called New Journalism—the essential difference is that the gathering of the story became part of the story. It was also called “participatory”journalism. For instance, George Plympton (incidentally, one of the Paris Review’s founders) published Paper Lion (1966) about training with the Detroit Lions. Many science/nature writers followed (David Quammen and Tim Cahill being two). A new wave of journalists with distinctive voices emerged—Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and scads of others. I think gonzo journalism, as a term, might’ve started with Thompson’s earlier book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Writers have always blurred the lines between fact and fiction—some novels are exceedingly autobiographical, some nonfiction based closely on personal experience—but this mode seemed perfectly suited to examining the counterculture of the 60s/70s. Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) was another classic (you should read it). Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 is about Thompson’s coverage of Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. Thompson was—how to say it?—a bit of wild man. Guns and drugs (lots of drugs) were involved. His work in Rolling Stone Magazine was accompanied by gonzo illustrations by Ralph Steadman.

A caricature of Thompson [Raoul Duke] became a staple of Doonesbury.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson

10

B. S. Johnson: English, modernist/experimental. I know him because an earlier novel turned up in Birth Year Project: 1969, The Unfortunates. Here’s what I wrote about him then:

The Unfortunates was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the chapters marked “First” and “Last.” As a structural experiment, it’s reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s novel, Hopscotch (1963). [Cortázar’s chapters could be read consecutively, up to a stopping point . . . or read according to a numbered scheme adding chapters not in the first reading, subtracting others. Over the years, various poets and fiction writers have tried to emulate the formal experimentation visual artists had pursued since the earliest days of the 20th Century—cubism, for instance, which let painters show all sides of an object at once, or how it moved through space/time as in Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” . . . but reading is stubbornly linear and most of the attempts to free the page from its constraints proved gimmicky, irritating, unillum-inating.

I haven’t read The Unfortunates [or even seen a copy], but I imagine that absorbing the chapters in random order isn’t an impossible burden to lay on the reader [much less than trying to parse unconventional page layouts, for instance, attempts at simultaneity such as side-by-side texts or merging texts within the flow of lines on the page]. There are a few “experimental” books in the canon of great reads—but only a few. So far I’ve spent two-hundred-some words on this footnote and haven’t even touched on what the novel’s about. Maybe that should tell us something. For the record, Jonathan Coe [The Rotter’s Club, 2001] called The Unfortunates “one of the lost masterpieces of the sixties.”

Click on the link in the list for a rundown on Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

11

Leon Forrest: This was his first novel; his editor for this and the next two books was Toni Morrison (who worked in publishing before she became a world-class writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993); it had an introduction by Ralph Ellison. I’d never heard of him, but he seems yet another example of a writer whose work should’ve kept him from disappearing down the time hole.

12

J. G. Farrell: The second book of his Empire Trilogy; the others: Troubles (1970) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Their only connection is that each is set in a former British colony. The Siege of Krishnapur treats the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. They’re all good reads. Working on Birth Year Project: 1951, I happened upon another novel about the same events: Nightrunners of Bengal, by John Masters.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Farrell

13

Red Shift: A NYRB reprint. Has an interesting structure: three sections, the first in Roman Britain, the second during the English Civil War [mid-1600s], and modern day. The common element is a place. Don’t skip Garner’s Introduction, where he relates a cool story about the nature of time and human memory.

14

Child of God: McCarthy’s writing isn’t for everybody; I don’t argue about him. I tell people The Road will be read way into the future. I tell people Suttree is my favorite novel (of anyone’s) and let it go at that. He wrote four novels before decamping to the Southwest and writing Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, which is where most readers caught up with him. Before Suttree were: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God. Lester Ballard is the child of God, and he’s a nasty piece of work. If you don’t like nasty pieces of work, you might skip this one (and Outer Dark). However, if you like your humor very dark indeed, you might like how the book ends.

So much has been written about McCarthy, who went from utter obscurity to big-time fame—you can read up on him if you want. [At least read a blurb about Suttree—life among the underclass on the Ohio River c. 1952, a book full of pathos, but also fiercely hilarious. But I said I wasn’t going to twist your arm.]

15

Tom McGuane: Native of Michigan, has lived in Montana’s Paradise Valley since the late 1960s. Outdoorsman, flyfisher, rider of cutting horses; has written a steady stream of novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works—also screenplays including Rancho Deluxe (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and Tom Horn (1981). Centerpoint of a community of writers—William Hjortsberg, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, the painter Russell Chatham, and others.

16

Sula: Her second novel, thin, amazingly well written. Just read it, if you haven’t. If you have, it wouldn’t hurt to read it again. Here’s a tiny taste:

  • But it was a love that, like a pan of syrup kept too long on the stove, had cooked out, leaving only its odor and a hard, sweet sludge, impossible to scrape off.

]]><![CDATA[Birth Year Project: 1951]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1951https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1951Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:02:52 GMT

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You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. So far, we’ve done 29 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1980, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1989 // 1971, 1973, 1978 // 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 // 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959 // 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

***Important Update About Footnotes:

Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp wry comments the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.

1951:

A slew of mysteries, spy books, thrillers. But the war is still on people’s minds . . .

Bestsellers/Well-Known Books/WWII:

The latter two dominated the Bestseller List for the majority of 1951.

Four Classics from the Golden Age of Sci-fi:

Five Works of World Lit:

Five Other Literary Novels:

Special Mention:

My List:

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1

Bradbury: Collection of stories “. . . tied together by the frame story of “The Illustrated Man”, a vagrant former member of a carnival freak show with an extensively tattooed body whom the unnamed narrator meets. The man’s tattoos, allegedly created by a time-traveling woman, are individually animated, and each tells a different tale.” [Wiki]

2

Cela: Original title: La colmena.

Cela was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature.

3

Gracq: His most famous work. Original title: Le Rivage des Syrtes (trans. by Richard Howard). From Wiki:

The story is set at the border between two fictional Mediterranean countries, Orsenna and Farghestan, which have been at war for 300 years. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt, but Gracq refused to accept the prize as a protest against commercial compromising in world literature. The novel has been described as a “Wagnerian prelude for an unplayed opera” as it doesn’t focus on telling a story but is first and foremost concerned with creating a mysterious, out-of-time atmosphere.

4

Molloy: I’ve written notes on Beckett in several earlier posts. Here’s the one for Malone Dies (1951):

This is Book Two of his trilogy, the others being Molloy (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). Though an Irishman, he wrote many of his mature works in French (for its purity of expression, he said), then translated them into English. I imagine a zillion dissertations ave been written about Beckett. If he’d written nothing but Waiting For Godot (first performed 1953), he’d still be famous.

He was prolific in both theatre and prose (and poetry—who knew?). The other plays I’d recommend: Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). His prose became highly experimental as he aged. Stripped-down, cryptic—and not just the language: Beckett tried to subtract basic elements of storytelling—he seemed to be asking how far you can go before there’s only silence left.

He led a fascinating, complex life—for instance, he worked in the French Resistance during WWII. And as a young man he was a scribe for James Joyce.

Here’s a little chunk of an essay I wrote some years ago:

“Before launching into his three linked novels . . . I thought, based on photos of his hawkish face, and abandonment of English, that Beckett would read like Sartre—that is, having the peculiar pallor of 40s and 50s Existentialism. Thus, I began Molloy with my guard up. We find the narrator at his mother’s, quite confused. How did he get there? He’s not sure. Then there’s this (we’re still on the first page):

The truth is I don’t know much. For example, my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she die later? I mean enough to bury.

Enough to bury?? I’m sorry, this put me in hysterics. I had him all wrong. Forget French. This was the black, self-lacerating humor of Irish pub stories, of wakes. If you don’t hear the undercurrent of fierce comedy in Beckett, he makes no sense at all.”

I recommend reading an overview of Molloy’s structure before diving in.

5

Hawkes: A postmodern novelist. Wrote thin, difficult-to-categorize books, often steeped in the perverse. He taught for years at Brown. I met him once in Missoula in the mid-70s, found him very urbane. Later, it came out that he’d written The Beetle Leg while living in eastern Montana, working as a tour guide at the Fork Peck dam. It’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to turn up at a spot like that.

Teaching, I often talked about his 1976 novel Travesty, a monolog delivered by the driver of a car hurtling through the French countryside toward a stone wall, delivered to his best friend and his daughter (that is, the driver’s) who’s been having an affair with the friend. Did I mention perverse? But the voice! Sometimes you have to just groove (darkly) on the daring of the experiment. Here’s how it sounds (page 1):

No, no Henri. Hands off the wheel. Please. It is too late. After all, at one hundred and forty-nine kilometers per hour on a country road in the darkest quarter of the night, surely it is obvious that your slightest effort to wrench away the wheel will pitch us into the toneless world of highway tragedy even more quickly than I have planned. And you will not believe it, but we are still accelerating. As for you Chantal, you must beware. You must obey your Papa. You must sit back in your seat and fasten your belt and stop crying. And Chantal, no more beating the driver about the shoulders or shaking his arm. Emulate Henri, my poor Chantal, and control yourself.

And a quote about his vision of fiction:

  • I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

[https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/other-americas/usa/hawkes/]

6

Manning: Blurb: “Olivia Manning’s great subject is the lives of ordinary people caught up in history.”

Here’s what I wrote about Manning in a recent post on trilogies:

  • Manning: I’d heard the name, that’s about it. Turns out she’s one of a cadre of early to mid-20th C. women writers whose fiction has—despite its indisputable worth—dropped from sight. We still read Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark; a few others have been rediscovered—Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937), and Dawn Powell—The Library of America has issued nine of her novels in two volumes, including my favorites, The Locusts Have No King (1948) and The Wicked Pavilion (1954).

But this leaves a slew of estimable women novelists we don’t read. Some I’ve worked into earlier posts: Harriet Arnow, Barbara Comyns, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jetta Carlson, Ellen Glasgow, Theodora Keogh, Jean Stafford, Grace Stratton-Porter, Rosemary Tonks . . .

  • Anyway, working on this post, I discovered The Balkan Trilogy, and have been sucked into the first volume’s world this week—had one of those, Oh, she can really write moments. Manning followed this triplet with a second one, The Levant Trilogy: The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980). The two trilogies have since been published together under the title Fortunes of War.

7

Elizabeth Taylor: [Not that one.] A British novelist whose work deserves to be remembered. Besides this one, I recommend: The Sleeping Beauty (1953), In a Summer Season (1963) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971).

]]><![CDATA[Quick Note from the Flight Deck]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/quick-note-from-the-flight-deckhttps://longd.substack.com/p/quick-note-from-the-flight-deckSat, 03 Jan 2026 20:05:09 GMTPosting two new Birth Year Project posts on Monday: 1951, 1973. Thanks for asking.

[A reminder to ignore the heading atop the BYP Index—there may be a secret path leading to where I can edit it; apparently access to it is above my pay grade.]

Wondrously insightful regular posts will resume a week later, 12 January.

Be well!

]]><![CDATA[David's Reading Life: 2025]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/davids-reading-life-2025https://longd.substack.com/p/davids-reading-life-2025Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:03:24 GMT

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Greetings one and all. This will be the last post until the first week of January. I wish good stuff for all of us—especially The United States of America.
[Let the record show that the paragraph-long rant that briefly occupied this space has been thought better of. You’re welcome.]
As I was saying, may joy find you the rest of this fraught year. See you soon.
[***Update about footnotes: All books are now hyperlinked in the list. Only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck are footnoted.]

When I finish reading a book, I write title and author on my yellow pad. The really good ones get a star/asterisk. The really really good ones get two.

2025’s Two-Star Books:

Other Contemporary Novels:

Not-So-Contemporary Novels:

Ten Speculative Novels:

Four Nonfiction Works:

  • The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder [history], David Grann (2023)

  • Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution [history] H. W. Brands (2021)

  • Family [memoir], Ian Frazier (1994)

  • West With the Night [memoir], Beryl Markham (1942)11

Fiction in Translation:

Best Novel By a Friend:

Books I Read That Left No Trace in My Mind:

  • My Husband, Maud Ventura (2021) [France]

  • Tasmania, Paolo Giordano (2024)13 [Italy]

  • Eternal Summer, Franziska Gänsler (2022) [Germany]

  • No One Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacy (2014)

Anthony Trollope Novels Logged This Year:

  • Dr. Wortle’s School (1881)

  • John Caldigate (1879)

  • The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870)

  • The Claverings (1867)

  • The Three Clerks (1858)

Long-Time TBR Title Finally Read:

  • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1959)14

First Books on 2026 TBR List:

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1

Stella Maris: This is the shortish companion to McCarthy’s final novel, The Passenger (2022). From Wiki:

  • The novel follows Alicia Western, a math prodigy conflicted by her father’s contributions to the American development of the atomic bomb. The entire novel is set in 1972 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, at the titular Stella Maris, “a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients,” as stated on page 3 (the only page that is not written in dialogue). The novel consists of a “series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy.

On the off-chance you haven’t heard me yak about this one already, the gist of my thoughts: a) I don’t argue about McCarthy’s novels; they’re not for everyone, b) Alicia’s talks with the doctor are a dance between two conflicting urges within her, to tell and not to tell, c) Alicia is one-of-a-kind human presence and I was thoroughly locked onto her voice, her depiction of her inner and outer lives. She’s extreme (as is Turtle Alveston in My Absolute Darling) and is, for all her messed-up-ness, a bright, human image. Moreover, at this point in my reading life, conventional stories feel less worthy of my attention—which may be why I read more speculative fiction these days (but only the kind where the writing is as sharp as the ideas or world-building).

2

My Absolute Darling: The reviews all say, Tough read but couldn’t put it down—

I came to this with no prior knowledge, disappeared into it for a large part of Thanksgiving holiday/weekend. Writer/critic William Gass says a memorable character is a bright, human image” [cf. above]. The memorable character here is Turtle, aged fourteen when the novel starts. If I start telling you what befalls her in the story, I’ll slip into the worn grooves of labeling—I’ll resist that temptation. She’s not an example of anything, she’s a complex one-off of a character. The book has the fierce forward momentum of a thriller (one not for the faint of heart), but I could not stop reading it.

3

The Wall: This is both speculative and translated, but I’m listing it here. It has one (never-explained) element that separates it from straight realism. It proves to be a story of adaptation, re-invention, doing without—also a story about the nature of solitude, daily work, and the double-edged sword of bonding with non-human creatures. There’s a lot of I went here and did this, then this, then this . . . but that’s the nature of her task she’s set for herself—to record, to say what went on (even if no one will ever read it). In addition: it contains more cow milking than most novels.

4

Headshot: A debut novel about a two-day U-18 girls’ boxing tourney in Reno. She doesn’t mess it up by trying too hard; good, in-the-moment description, attention to detail, not laden with the weight of symbolism. Longlisted/shortlisted/finalisted for a bunch of major awards. And she’s blessed with an unforgettable name. I’ll read whatever she writes next.

5

Sandwich: Bought this on a whim. A family’s week at the cottage on the Cape they rent each summer. It’s not Anna Karenina, but I read it happily. Closely observed domestic life. It has a sequel, Wreck (2025).

6

Olivia Manning: She was one of the trilologists we looked at here (see footnote 7). This is the first book of her first trilogy, The Balkan Trilogy. She sticks with same couple in a subsequent trilogy, The Levant Trilogy. All six books, taken together, are known as The Fortunes of War. Both trilogies have been reprinted by the New York Review of Books Press.

7

Tilt: Hugely pregnant young woman goes shopping for a crib at an IKEA in Portland, Oregon . . . when “the big one” hits. The through-line is her survival in the ensuing chaos, her refusal to succumb. That’s pretty much the whole story—but it’s a short novel and I think this is enough. I read it straight through.

Oddly, I wrote a flash story a couple of years ago about a guy whose car is on one of Portland’s massive bridges when it collapses—he and his rig end up trapped in a pocket between cement slabs. My story may have its origin in my noting the rusted rebar emerging from the concrete of the bridge deck each time, way up in the air, I cross the Williamette.

8

Piranesi: This is a shortish speculative novel readers gush over. I liked reading it—the created world’s imagery is attention-capturing, and not knowing what’s going on propels you forward. Both excellent qualities. Yet I found the reveal disappointing. Long ago, when I taught poetry to kids in Montana schools, I’d sometimes encounter one who wrote something different, something new, but it would end: . . . and then Mom woke me up for school. I’d feel a little sigh of letdown—kid can only own the imagery by saying it was a dream.

But, oh, endings are hard—finding the right embodiment of an ending’s two necessary qualities: surprise and fulfillment. You need both (often, in my experience, writing, the best ones just appear—not haphazardly, but the result of immersion in the material with right brain and left brain, both). In Piranesi, you can’t exit the story without some explication for the strangeness, but the denouement pops the bubble in a way that left me feeling, Oh, OK, huh, not Wow, that’s so cool! There are books that don’t explain—Kafka doesn’t explain, Ishiguro’s marvelous cipher, The Unconsoled, doesn’t explain . . . Maybe I’ll go back and have a second look.

9

Sower: Think of this as a two-book set—the other is Parable of the Talents (1998). I was expecting a lot more woo-woo; instead, it’s straight-forward near-future realism. Very readable. I can’t speak to her other books, but she’s revered by fantasy readers.

10

Priest: Here’s a bit from the Wiki:

The opening sentence of this novel, “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles,” has generated comments by many readers. Critic Paul Kincaid writes that “it has justly become one of the most famous in science fiction.” James Timarco says similarly, “From the first sentence, ‘I had reached the age of 650 miles,’ readers are aware that something is deeply wrong about this world. We know it has something to do with the relationship between space and time, but beyond this we can only guess.”

Nick Owchar, in the Los Angeles Times, writes that a “reason for the story’s appeal is the way in which Priest, with the novel’s very first sentence, immerses us within a strange new reality . . . time in this world is measured best by distances.”

Priest wrote several dozen speculative novels under his own name and several others, won awards, was well-regarded by other writers. Among his other novels was The Prestige (1995)—Wiki terms it a science fantasy psychological horror mystery novel. Dueling Victorian stage magicians. Christopher Nolan (Memento, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk) made a film of it [Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale].

[And here’s Priest’s Top Ten Slipstream Novels from the Guardian (2003).]

11

Markham:

12

Sausage: Really, you should buy a copy.

13

Tasmania: A bestseller in Italy, written by a particle physicist—he published the earlier bestseller, The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010).

14

Achebe: Another trilogy opener followed by No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964).

15

Szalay: Winner of 2025 Booker.

]]><![CDATA[Reading Project [25]: Reading Canada]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-project-25-reading-canadahttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-project-25-reading-canadaMon, 01 Dec 2025 14:04:06 GMT

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***Important Update About Footnotes:

Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.

1.

My father’s father came from Port Dover, Ontario, Canada (north shore of Lake Erie). In the 1920s, he ran a business college [secretarial skills—shorthand, etc.] in Flint, Michigan. Due to political turmoil in my own home country, I inspected the requirements for Canadian citizenship. Turns out I can’t be grandfathered in.

My mother used to say of me, “You have a lot of Canadian in you. They’re a dour people.” [She made dour rhyme with pure.]

Be that as it may, Americans tend to find out a writer/artist/band is from Canada only after they’ve made it big in the States or won an international award. We love our Margaret Atwood, yet we don’t really think about Canadian Literature as a thing.

Besides Atwood and Alice Munro, how many Canadian writers can you name?

I’ll go first:

Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf), Robertson Davies (The Deptford Trilogy), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)1, Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers), Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) and then there’s um, there’s . . .

What about Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)—born in Sri Lanka, has lived in Canada since the1960s) . . . or Emma Donoghue (Room)—born in Dublin, Canadian since the 1990s)?

What about writers you know but didn’t realize were Canadian—for me: Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), Rawi Hage (Carnival), Cory Doctorow (many sci-fi novels)?

2.

Last year, I started working on a post called Reading the 1990s [we’d already had Reading the 1920s, Reading the 1930s] . . . but in no time I saw there were too many books to sift through. Chaos! Same thing’s happening here.

So today we’re going to focus on Canadian fiction published in the last decade, starting with the winners of Canada’s major literary awards, then look at some of the other nominees, and a few writers who’ve turned up elsewhere.

Major Canadian Literary Awards/Fiction:

  • The Giller Prize (formerly The Scotiabank Giller Prize): English-language fiction, $100,000 for winner; $10,000 for finalists.

  • Governor General’s Literary Awards: Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Drama, Young People’s Literature, Translation. $25,000 for winners; $1,000 for finalists.

3.

Last ten winners of the Giller Prize:

Last ten winners of Governor General’s Award for Fiction:

Last Ten Winners of Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize (2015) Fiction:

Last Ten RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Winners:

Last Ten CBC Short Story Award Winners:

International Dublin Literary Award: Canadian nominees

Some observations:

  • Not much overlap—it seems unlikely that jurors made sure awards went to non-winners of other prizes; more likely just a diversity of opinion. More on this.8

  • Of the 46 writers above, I’ve read only two, and not these books listed: Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (2012) and Omar El Akkad, American War (2017). I recommend both.

  • I recognized the names of Michael Crummey, Anne Michaels, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Madeleine Thien, and Guy Vanderhaeghe, but have never read their writing. Everyone else was foreign to me. Why?

4.

Books Recommended by My Friend Traci Who Lives Way Up in B.C.:

Twelve More from among the nominees:

  • https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads

  • https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest/contemporary/books/written-by/canadian/authors/from/1990/to/2025

  • https://www.cbc.ca/books/71-canadian-fiction-books-to-read-in-spring-2025-1.7443365

  • https://www.beyondthebookends.com/the-best-canadian-novels-by-canadian-authors/

5.

The Project/Challenge:

Part One: There are 50-odd books hotlinked in this post. Click on at least 20, read the intel, assemble your own Longlist [12-15 titles].

  • Read (at least) six (your shortlist], either back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back, or one per month for the next half-year.

Part Two: There are 20 stories linked in the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and CBC Short Story Award sections. Read 6-8.

Extra credit: If any of the story writers you read have published collections, read one of those.

1

Toews: A favorite writer of mine since reading All My Puny Sorrows (two sisters). She won a wider readership with Women Talking (2018), which was filmed by Canadian actor/director, Sarah Polley [Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, Claire Foy]—a very serious story, drugged rapes in a Mennonite community. After which she wrote the hilarious Fight Night (2021). Her newest work is a memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace (2025).

Near as I can tell, you say her surname Tay-ves.

2

Pick a Colour: From Bookshop.org [if you need to buy books online, buy them here]:

  • Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto, where she now lives. She is the author of four poetry books; the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the novel Pick a Color, winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON.

3

Omar El Akkad: Read about him via the link in the list. He was on my radar because of his 2017 novel, American War, a convincingly read near-future story of civil war on the character level. I’ll have to read this next one. Since then he’s published what the NYTimes calls a memoir/manifesto, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which became a bestseller and won the National Book Award. [Great title!]

4

Washington Black: Historical, Wash Black’s escape from slavery. Rave reviews all around. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Became a 2025 mini-series on Hulu.

5

Five Little Indians: From Wiki:

Five Little Indians was CBC‘s number one book recommendation in 2021. Amnesty International Book Club selected Five Little Indians for their book club in 2021. Now named Five Little Indians one of the top ten novels of 2020. The Globe and Mail, CBC, Kobo, and Indigo also named the book in their lists of the best books of the year.

The novel was selected for the 2022 edition of Canada Reads.

6

Some Hellish: Lobsterman, Prince Edward Island. Read about him here.

7

Dear Evelyn: For several years, I subscribed to a U.K. press based in Sheffield, & Other Stories. This is one of theirs. You can read about it here. And about & Other Stories here.

8

Overlap:

  • Some winners of one prize were shortlisted for another.

  • A few books were shortlisted for international prizes: Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein [2023 Booker]; Held, Anne Michaels [2024 Booker].

9

Christie: Blurbage: From the award-winning author of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets Barkskins in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.

  • NATIONAL BESTSELLER
    Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
    Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
    Finalist for The BC Book Awards
    Finalist for The Evergreen Award
    An Indie Next Pick
    Named one of CBC’s best books of 2019

]]><![CDATA[Birth Year Project: 1981]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1981https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1981Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:03:32 GMT
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. To date, we’ve done 27 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1980, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1989 // 1971, 1978 // 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 // 1950, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959 // 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

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***Important Update About Footnotes:

Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.

1981

Not the typical run of blockbusters this year.

Among the sci-fi/thriller/police-procedural/spy/mass-market crowd are familiar names, but few stand-out titles.

Some writers added to continuing series [God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert]; Stephen King published Cujo [Esquire ranked it 22nd out of his 77 titles]; there were lesser/middling/forgettable works from great writers [Toni Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby; Joseph Wambaugh’s Glitter Dome, etc.]

The Well-Known/Bestselling Fiction list below is atypical—none are bestsellers of the Shōgun, Gone With the Wind, Hawaii, Valley of the Dolls, Love Story, Harry Potter sort. They’re more literary; they overlap with my own list.

Well-Known/Bestselling Fiction:

Four Novels From Elsewhere in the World:

Five More Literary Novels of 1981:

My List: Short story collections

My List: Novels

1

Red Dragon: Harris’s second novel. The debut of Hannibal Lector, precursor to The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Not the kind of stuff I read . . . except in this case I was at a writing conference in Joseph, Oregon, and stayed up most of one night reading it. So naturally I had to read The Silence of the Lambs.

James Ellroy: “. . . the best pure thriller I’ve ever read.”

Stephen King: “ . . . probably the best popular novel to be published in America since The Godfather.”

2

Theroux: Has written a slew of novels, but is more widely known as a top-tier travel writer/essayist . . . among many other titles:

  • Dark Star Safari (2002)

  • Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China (1988)

  • The Old Patagonian Express (1979)

  • The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

The Mosquito Coast: Story of brilliant eccentric who relocates his family from New England to the jungles of Central America. A twisted Swiss Family Robinson, told by the fourteen-year-old son.

Side note: For many years Theroux was an acolyte/friend of of writer V. S. Naipaul, but in the mid-1990s they had a bitter falling out—or better to say Naipaul suddenly froze him out. Theroux detailed this interaction in Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998). Fifteen years later, as the Independent put it (below), they buried the hatchet.

  • https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/celebrated-literary-feud-ends-after-naipaul-and-theroux-bury-the-hatchet-2290775.html

Theroux has led a complex, global life. Read about him:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Theroux

3

Rabbit Is Rich: Book Three of the Rabbit Quartet. The third-person narration is a terrific example of how you can make third-person sound like first-person—the narrative voice takes on the sound of the principal character’s inner sound/cadence. By this book, Rabbit, the one-time high school basketball star has drifted into middle age and runs a successful car dealership. The novel begins with a long riff in which Rabbit stands in the dealerships’s front window watching the traffic, musing on the state of life in the 1970s. Every time the Rabbit books come up, my wife alludes to that opening passage. A time capsule of the late 70s middle-class male consciousness.

The other books are: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). He added a coda in 2001, Rabbit Remembered.

Updike was a superb craftsman—his sentences are meticulous. He wrote too many novels IMHO—indeed, he published at least one book a year for his entire adult life (including poetry, sports writing, memoir, and art criticism). The novels are always finely constructed, but I wish someone had talked him out of several at the idea stage.

Last year, I read a hit piece on Updike by a young American woman novelist and felt very sad, as Updike was one of my heroes in the matter of sentence craft. Did he represent an outmoded model of sexuality? I’m gonna stay out of that. Everyone falls out of favor, everyone is taken to task for not having the same values/modes of behavior endorsed by the the enlightened writers/readers of the following generations. I’d really hate seeing this brilliant writer reduced to a Dead Old Sexist White Guy.

Final note: A number of his short stories regularly appear in anthologies and textbooks—”A & P, “Pigeon Feathers,” “The Family Meadow,” and some of the Maples stories. But I like the tone of the later stories. Here are some I love:

  • “The Sandstone Farmhouse”

  • “Poker Night”

  • “Deaths of Distant Friends”

  • “Leaf Season”

  • “My Father’s Tears”

  • “The Afterlife”

Here’s a link to the Library of America’s collection his late stories:

  • https://www.loa.org/books/390-collected-later-stories/

4

A Flag for Sunrise: Stone was a serious literary writer, a frequent finalist for major literary awards. My first encounter with Stone was his second novel Dog Soldiers (1974)—co-winner of National Book Award. Wiki’s notes begin:

  • Dog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s.

A Flag for Sunrise was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

5

Garcia Marquez: Winner of 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two other major works, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_a_Death_Foretold

6

Thomas: I’ve never read this, but looking at the citation I thought maybe I should have a look. Short-listed for the Booker, winner of other prizes.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Hotel

7

McEwan: His second novel. He went on to become a major British writer—prolific, many awards. The one I know best is On Chesil Beach (2007), the story of a disastrous wedding night and its fallout. Also known for Atonement (2001). Some of the novels are touched by the macabre or fantastic, but he’s a major literary writer, who doesn’t stay in the same groove book to book.

8

Wharton: Pen name of American writer, Albert William Du Aime. His second novel, after the highly successful Birdy (1978). Birdy, Dad, and several other novels became films with the likes of Ethan Hawke and Jack Lemon. Dad is considered highly autobiographical.

9

Donald Barthelme: A category of one. I could describe his stories but you still wouldn’t get what they’re like—meta, skewed way off to one side, droll, cerebral, funny-though-you’re-not-sure-why . . . Not to everyone’s taste—but what is? Brothers Steven and Frederick are also writers.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Barthelme

10

Raymond Carver: This was the book that did it for me (and a thousand other short story writers), though editor Gordon Lish’s influence and the stripping-down of Carver’s voice continues to be a discussion point. [Read the two versions of “A Small, Good Thing.”] Also note that the stories he wrote late in life are much fuller.

He died at fifty, depriving us of what would’ve come next. Here’s his poem, ”Gravy”—published by The New Yorker a week after his death:

  • No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
    Gravy these past ten years.
    Alive, sober, working, loving and
    being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
    ago he was told he had six months to live
    at the rate he was going. And he was going
    nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
    somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
    After that it was all gravy, every minute
    of it, up to and including when he was told about,
    well, some things that were breaking down and
    building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
    he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
    I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
    expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

For a time, young writers tried to write like Carver, to do his aesthetic, his sound, his slice of the socio-economic pie. The trouble with that is you only copy what’s on the surface, not the thing itself. There was only one Carver—his work grew out of his life. Even the simplest Carver stories are unique, saturated with heart. Trying to sync up with the prevailing (or about-to-be-prevailing) zeitgeist it understandable, and sometimes proves liberating, but IMHO it’s better to emulate the writer’s example—the discipline or daring or persistence or whatever qualities have led to getting the work done and done well—than to copy what another writer’s work looks like.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver

11

Helprin: I still have my beat-up old hardcover of this one. Helprin was a strange figure, an American who served in the Israeli Air Force, writer of Winter’s Tale and other novels. This collection has one of my favorite stories, “A Vermont Tale,”—meticulous prose, great management of tone.

12

Tobias Wolff: Novelist, story writer, nonfiction writer, professor. Both he and his brother wrote nonfiction books about their father: The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (Geoffrey, 1979) and This Boy’s Life (Toby, 1989). Wolff is among the story writers who helped re-energize the short story form within the Ray Carver/Ann Beattie/Lorrie Moore era. His 1996 collection, The Night in Question, has two stories I love: “The Other Miller” (contains a world-class reveal), and “Bullet in the Brain”—a perfect story, of the sort you write once or twice in a lifetime. Short story writers revere it.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Wolff

13

Molly Keane: Here’s the note from an earlier post:

. . . just read this one and it’s pretty delicious. The title is like a faceted stone—depends on which direction the light’s coming from. Note: Don’t let the fact that the narrator may have murdered her mother in the opening pages stand in your way, OK?

Keane was Irish. Her real name was Mary Nesta Skrine, but published her novels and plays under the name M. J. Farrell. She married Bobby Keane in 1938, and they had two daughters. Then, in 1946, the husband died suddenly, her most recent play flopped, and she published nothing for the next twenty years. Only then came Good Behaviour, the first work to appear under her own name.

14

Hotel New Hampshire: After The World According to Garp (1978), I read everything Irving wrote for a while, but fell away eventually. I never considered this book in the top group along with Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and several others. I think he fell out of fashion, especially with younger female readers. Nonetheless, he’s among the major writers of his generation. The Hotel New Hampshire has its fans. Everyone should read a novel of Irving’s.

15

Vogan: A friend from Missoula days. This one’s about a women’s softball team and a bar named for the owner’s missing leg. Sara also wrote many good short stories—we both had collections in the Illinois Short Fiction Series—hers was Scenes from the Homefront (1987).

]]><![CDATA[Birth Year Project: 1948]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1948https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1948Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:03:31 GMT
You supply your birth year, I respond with an overview of what was published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I’d recommend. If your year’s already been done, I’ll do an update. To date, we’ve done 27 years—between 1939 and 1992 (age range: 33 to 86).
The current census: 1992 // 1980, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1989 // 1971, 1978 // 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 // 1950, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959 // 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948 // 1939
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you’re unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I’ll aggregate and post.

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Someone finally requested 1948 for the Birth Year Project!

Me.

At the annual meeting of American Booksellers Association Random House co-founder, Bennett Cerf said there’d been “only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading: The Naked and the Dead; Cry, The Beloved Country; The Ides of March.

Wiki lists roughly 120 works of adult fiction published in 1948 (many others routinely escape their notice). I’m highlighting about 30—as usual, I’ve skipped most of the crime/detective/thriller/historical-romance/straight sci-fi titles (unless otherwise noteworthy). Also, as usual, I found books I don’t know by well-known or semi-well-known writers—Taylor Caldwell, A. J. Cronin, Howard Fast, L. P. Hartley, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, others.

As always, I hope you spend some time with today’s list, and end up reading one or more of the books. I’ve asterisked [*] ones I’ve read.

The 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature was given to T. S. Eliot.

About the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The 1948 Prize was for a 1947 book [James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific]. The 1949 Prize winner, published in 1948, was James Gould Cozzens’, Guard of Honor [see below].

[Wiki also lists 1948’s notable literary births. Due to an egregious oversight, mine was omitted—it would fall between 4 March (James Ellroy) and 17 March (William Gibson). However, here’s a fun fact: I was born in Philips House/Massachusetts General Hospital, overlooking the Charles River. Six days later, in the same spot, James Taylor was born.]

***Important Update About Footnotes:

Books with only a Wiki page are now hyperlinked in the list. I’ll footnote only those with further references/links/razor-sharp wry comments the flight deck. I’ll repeat this note in future notes for a while.

1948

Best Sellers/Best-Known Novels:

Sample of World Literature:

Others works:

Four more-obscure novels worth checking out:

My List:

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1

The Naked and the Dead: I noted this novel in an earlier BYP post about WWII novels written by soldier-participants. Mailer’s was the first, followed by The Young Lions. then in 1951 by James Jones’s From Here to Eternity and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Mailer’s story concerns American soldiers taking a mountainous, densely jungled island in the Philippines. As the novel progresses it gradually becomes a tale of futility, misjudgment, and pointless sacrifice.

The Naked and the Dead spent 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The publisher wouldn’t let Mailer use the word “fuck” so he changed them all to “fug.” Actress Tallulah Bankhead reportedly once said to Mailer, “Oh, hello, you’re . . . the young man that doesn’t know how to spell.”

The underground rock band, the Fugs, took their name from Mailer’s novel.

2

The Ides of March: An epistolary novel depicting the last days of the Roman Republic, leading up to Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE.

[If you’d like an excellent history of this period, see Tom Holland’s, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003).]

Writing this post, I’ve gotten a new sense of Wilder’s range—we tend to forget he wrote anything beyond Our Town, and tend to write that off as over-sentimental (a mistake). It won one of Wilder’s three Pulitzers; the others are the novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), and the play, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).

This week I’m reading his 1967 novel, The Eighth Day (winner of the National Book Award).

3

Snow Country: A classic of Japanese lit. Appeared serially in literary journals between 1935 and 1937; first complete Japanese version published 1948; English translation in 1956. Set in a remote mountain hot spring, the affair between a wealthy Tokyo dilettante and a geisha.

Other major works:

  • Thousand Cranes (1952)

  • The Master of Go (1954)

  • The Sound of the Mountain (1954)

  • Beauty and Sadness (1965)

Kawabata was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature.

4

Laxness: I’ve mentioned Laxness in earlier posts. Here’s the note about Independent People from Reading Projects [1]: The 1930s:

Winner of 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature, from Iceland. This novel is considered the centerpiece of this career. I read it years ago based on the rave intro by Brad Leithauser, and to be candid here, found it a bit of a slog. But many revere this book. Ten years ago, I walked through Laxness’s residence outside Reykjavik—kept much as it was, books and all, and felt it a great honor.

Recently I read another, Under the Glacier [intro by Susan Sontag], much shorter and stranger and a hell of a lot funnier. From a Salon review: If there were any justice in the literary world . . . this amazing little volume would inspire a cult following . . . Under the Glacier is hilarious . . . A luminous tale of timeless mythic profundity.

Archipelago has just issued a new translation of Salka Valka [1931-32], which I mean to read this summer. Archipelago books are such handsome artifacts—you just want to hold them! Alice Munro: Laxness is a beacon in twentieth century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.

5

Dorothy West: A member of the writing community/movement known as The Harlem Renaissance.

See Reading Projects [13]: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond.

6

Alexander Baron: From the City, From the Plough is a WWII story. I’m recommending Baron because I’m interested in his 1963 novel, The Low Life. From Wiki: “set in Hackney, a riotous, off-beat novel about gamblers, prostitutes and lay-abouts of London’s East End.” Reissued by Faber & Faber in May 2025.

7

Jon Godden: Rumer Godden’s sister. Check out her Wiki (in list).

8

William Maxwell: One day in the mid-1990s, I was at an awards gathering in NYC, and made my way up to Maxwell, a dapper older gentleman, one-time Midwesterner, who’d spent his life writing and editing fiction at The New Yorker. He’d been one of my heroes since I’d happened on his short 1980 novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (one of my top-five favorites of all time). I attempted to express my appreciation, but found myself babbling. He quietly explained I was doing fine.

This book was published thirty-two years earlier, but has the same quality of poignancy and unfussy precision of language. In 1992 he published Billie Dyer and Other Stories, which I also wholeheartedly recommend—these stories are now in All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories.

Really you should read William Maxwell.

9

Old Mr. Flood: Not to be confused with Edgar Robinson’s poem, “Mr. Flood’s Party” [or, for that matter the band Mr. Flood’s Party or Jess Kidd’s novel, Mr. Flood’s Last Resort or the bar in Ann Arbor.

I have the jacketless first edition my parents’ friends gave them; it’s a kind of sacred artifact if mine (along with an oil painting by Hildegard Rath from 1952, Fulton Fish Market in foreground, Brooklyn Bridge in back—the fish market being the connection). It’s a skinny book, three pieces about Hugh G. Flood, retired house-wrecker living on a diet of fresh seafood. Joseph Mitchell was a quintessential New Yorker writer—known among other things for his world-class writer’s block. Late in life a collection, Up in the Old Hotel, won him new fans (it includes OMF).

At some point, later on, there was a flap over Mitchell calling the book “journalism”—he revealed the fact that Mr. Flood was a composite character based on “several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market.” He wanted the pieces, he said,”to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts.”

This book delights me for a bunch of reasons, not least because of the quality of the prose. I hope you read it; I hope it delights you, too—if it doesn’t please keep that to yourself. Deal?

10

Dawn Powell: A major mid-century novelist/playwright—prolific, sharply satiric, smart. Read her Wiki (below)

She should not have fallen out of public awareness. The Library of America has recently brought out a two-volume compendium of her novels, including Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), A Time To Be Born (1942) The Wicked Pavilion (1954), The Golden Spur (1962), and others.

]]><![CDATA[Reading Projects [24]: I always meant to . . .]]>https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-24-i-always-meanthttps://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-24-i-always-meantMon, 03 Nov 2025 14:02:47 GMT
Oil Painting by Lauren Pretorius [https://laurenpretorius.com]

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Note: Last post [Beryl Markham] I said (quoting now) “we crashed through the 500-subscriber barrier.” Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this? Within hours, seven subscribers went poof.
[Sometimes I think I should do videos where I hold five books up sideways so you can’t tell what they are until, one by one, I reveal them and say: Now this one is really awesome, you have to read this one, it’s one of the best [fill in genre] book I’ve read all year. You see, because then I’d have 2.5K followers and not have to write anything.]
Sigh.

Reading Project [24]

Welcome all: Time for a reading project with fewer moving parts . . .

If you’re a DL2.0 regular, you’ve heard about David’s Insane Reading Project [reading a work of literature published in each year], and you’ve heard me explain that in picking off various years, I tricked myself into reading classics I’d theretofore turned my nose up at.

And that I’d made three ground rules: a) I could read them in any order; b) there was no deadline (aside from the Big Deadline); and c) I couldn’t skip a book I knew I ought to read just because that year had already been checked off.

Today’s reading challenge derives from the third rule.

Background:

On my Master List (equivalent of a birder’s Life List) the years since 2000 have 25-40 titles each. 1983 has 201. 1970 has 102.

You have to go back to 1916 to find a year with only only one [A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, James Joyce]. Others in the vicinity: 1910 [Howards End, E. M. Forster]; 1908 [The Iron Heel, Jack London]; 1907 [Father and Son (memoir), Edmund Gosse]; 1901 [The Octopus, Frank Norris].

About half the 19th C. years have only a single title. The first break comes after 1793 [The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin (autobiography)]—no 1792.

Now I realize some of you think David’s Insane Reading Project is the work of a crackpot [I take what’s called an Alford Plea on this charge]. I see it as a game.

OK, back to the third rule: Let’s look at 1939: A while ago, you were on a noir jag and read your way through the five best Raymond Chandlers: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), Lady in the Lake (1943), The Long Goodbye (1953). And because you’re an American grown-up interested in our national story, you’ve read The Grapes of Wrath. You’ve also read Flann O’Brien’s droll comic masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds (which might have something to do with the Irish national story). Then (as happened to me) a guy at the coffee shop said, Hey, you ever any John Fante? No? Check out Ask the Dust.3 Those last three were published in 1939, same as The Big Sleep, but that’s OK because you read what you feel like reading (even if you keep track). I mean, it’s not as if you were going to skip The Grapes of Wrath because you’d already read The Big Sleep, right?

Long ago, you read Main Street, but you recently read Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, House of Mirth, and wanted to compare it to a later one, say, The Age of Innocence (published the same year as Main Street, 1920). So you do. Again, it’s not as if you were going to avoid The Age of Innocence because you’d already done Main Street.

Well, you could. Who’s stopping you? Except that The Age of Innocence and Main Street both fall into the category Books I Ought to Read at Some Point. According to whom? You, of course—who else?

Let’s go further back. Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables appeared in 1851. George Gissing’s New Grub Street, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, are all 1891.

And what about the three gifted-but-ill-fated Brontë sisters who each published novels in 1847: Agnes Grey (Anne, writing as Acton Bell), Jane Eyre (Charlotte, as Currer Bell), and Wuthering Heights (Emily, as Ellis Bell)?

Or 1876: Daniel Deronda (George Eliot), The Prime Minister (Anthony Trollope), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain).

These examples are from my list. You’ll have your own. But, at last, we’ve come to the point:

I logged multiple books for certain years because (even though the rules of my game said I had to read only one) the others were books I thought I should read.

But what does that mean, books I thought I should read?

What’s with the should?

Here’s how I put it to myself: I’m a writer and reader of literary fiction (with some sci-fi/thriller/mystery thrown in), and there are books I think I should have read . . . not because I’m trying to ingest the entire Western canon or anyone’s online list (The 500 Books Everyone Should Read, etc.). No, it’s because I have a sense of how to honor who I think I am as a reader.

Examples?

  • Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, 1881

  • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1869) [Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky trans.]

  • Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, 1862 [Julie Rose trans.]

  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847

  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818

  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 1813

  • De Rerum Natura [treatise], Lucretius, after 54 BCE4

Any still on the list? [Always.]

  • The Neapolitan Quartet [Elena Ferrante, 2011-2014, trans. by Ann Goldstein, 2012-2015]:

    • My Brilliant Friend (2011)

      The Story of a New Name (2012)

      Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)

      The Story of the Lost Child (2014)

  • The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie (1988)

  • The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (1970)

  • David Copperfield, Dickens (1850)

  • Don Quixote [Miguel de Cervantes (1605/1615), Edith Grossman trans. 2003]5

The Reading Project/Challenge:

  • Sit yourself down and think about the books you believe the reader you want to be should have read in a lifetime.

  • Make a list of three you’ve never gotten around to (but, you know, meant to).

  • Over the next six months, read two.

NOTES:

  • Some writers I thought would be utter slogs, weren’t when I just relaxed into the story, or stopped focusing on how different the writing is from ours. Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper. (Not saying you should read them, just how astonished I was that Adderall6 wasn’t needed.)

  • My examples are all old—19th C. and beyond. Yours don’t need to be. Ever read Dr. Zhivago [English trans. 1958]? What about:

    • The Road [Cormac McCarthy, 2006]

    • White Teeth [Zadie Smith, 2000]

    • Blindness [José Saramago, 1995]

    • Beloved [Toni Morrison, 1987]

    • The Handmaid’s Tale [Margaret Atwood, 1985]

    • Love Medicine [Louise Erdrich, 1984]

    • Sophie’s Choice [William Styron, 1979]

    • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [Muriel Spark, 1961]7

    • On the Beach [Nevil Shute, 1957]8

  • Old novels can be funny. Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth (1800), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett (1771), Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne (1760-66).

  • This isn’t grad school. This exercise is supposed to be pleasantly re-orienting; if it’s not worth the effort, then bail. No one’s watching (not even me).

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1

1983: The cream:

  • Pitch Dark, Renata Adler

  • Cathedral [stories], Raymond Carver

  • In the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Joan Chase

  • A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest J. Gaines

  • Ironweed, William Kennedy

  • Cal, Bernard MacLaverty

  • Glengarry Glen Ross [play], David Mamet

2

1970: The cream:

  • Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow

  • Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

  • Troubles, J. G. Farrell

  • The Crofter and the Laird [reportage], John McPhee

3

Ask the Dust:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_the_Dust

4

Lucretius: No, really. Helps disavow you of certain ideas about what the ancients knew/suspected about . . . well, the nature of things. It’s remarkable how much he got right, considering the limits of his technology—or if not right, at least barking up the right tree. (Of course, some of it is dead wrong, or influenced by attitudes about social norms we’ve jettisoned). My copy, one of the small red Loeb Classical Library editions [Latin on the left, English on the right], is full of highlighting.

Actually, if you’re in a bookshop with a robust selection of these [the Greek ones are green BTW], poke around a bit. There are histories, letters, accounts of wars, origin stories, satires, etc. Consider getting one. I remember reading Juvenal’s Satires and being delighted to see that the Romans made fun of the same personality types we make fun of—tightwads, pompous asses, blowhards, chiselers, and what have you.

5

Cervantes: I’ll have to rework one of my retorts [The Don Quixote Refusal]: I haven’t ever read Don Quixote, and you expect me to read this??

6

Adderall: Which is a good thing, because I don’t have any.

7

Spark: Scottish, wrote 22 slender novels, nine story collections and a whole bunch of other stuff. This one’s a classic, but try The Girls of Slender Means (1963) as well. She’s very good, sly, sharp-tongued as needed.

8

Shute: This was his great book. But he wrote lots of others; two I vouch for:

  • Requiem for a Wren [American title, The Breaking Wave] (1955)

  • A Town Like Alice [American title, The Legacy] (1950)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute

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