The Towering Irrelevance

What I Read, Part 2

These are more of the books I read this year.

Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama (Ugly Duckling Presse)

This is just a chapbook, so it might not count. But Ben Fama is a new icon of the Brooklyn poetry scene. He’s churning out gorgeous, smart and bitingly aware poetry (in a tiny write-up for the store I applauded him for using the word .gif in a poem in this book), hosting readings, and editing Supermachine which, at only two issues deep, may already be my new favorite poetry magazine. He’s sincere to a fault, but that fault turns out to be poetry. Love this guy.

The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich by Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse)

This is another chapbook. This list, like this blog as a whole, I guess, sort of works on rules of serendipity and the incidental. These weren’t my favorite books but those I can remember, and in an order they themselves have dictated. Well, no, I guess Matvei’s was one of my favorite books. It is a beautiful tiny green chap that I first saw up in Unnameable, and inside are three and four line poems listing the names of trees. I already posted a small taste here. I defy you to not find the thing incredibly satisfying.

Meeks by Julia Holmes (Small Beer)

This is the debut novel by Julia, Brooklyn-based and a sweetheart. It is also the first book bought by her editor Jed Berry, himself a sweetheart. The novel, however: not so sweet. I mean, full of tender moments, sure, but also so thick from beginning to end with overpowering dread. Will he get that wedding suit? PLEASE LET HIM FIND A SUIT. This book as a whole stuck with me, but some scenes are just indelible. Those set in a dingy over-hot boarding home feel pretty true to Brooklyn life.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

I liked it. I just didn’t like it as much as everyone else seems to have. Or even as much as most other books on this list. Is there anything else to be said? 

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley (Berkley)

I reread this one last month. John Varley is a looming figure of SF in the eighties, but I feel like he’s so often overlooked by anthologists and writers because he wasn’t part of a movement in a decade defined by those. This was his first novel, written after a handful of assured and exciting stories. It’s still in print, but I grabbed an old hardcover copy at Housing Works. It’s full of space-whales and cloning paradox and three or four flavors of transhumanism. I love it.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley Jr. (Yale)

Wait, did I read this this year or last fall? Anyone remember? Does this thing count? Jesus, I don’t know. Was that Christmas weekend I was reading it? Maybe? Well anyway the Dreyfus affair matters because justice still matters and modern anti-semitism as it first began to be manifested around the time of the Dreyfus trials is still with us. Begley is a great writer, though I still haven’t gotten to his novels. A charming gent, too. The twists and turns of this travesty make for an exciting and enraging read, and Begley does a good job of drawing connections between the Affair and our own incredible imprisonment and mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo and at black sites around the world. Some of the guilty parties involved with persecuting Dreyfus killed themselves, though more out of self pity than any other reason. Can you imagine Rumsfeld, Cheney, Yoo, Bush, or hell, even Obama who has become almost equally culpable, doing the same?

The Beetle in the Anthill by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (Macmillan)

The Strugatskys are the giants of Soviet SF, if you discount earlier writers like Zamyatin. This book doesn’t match their Snail on the Slope for sheer debilitating weirdness, but it has all of their trademarks. Social interaction vacillates only between manipulation and desperate tragic love. Suvin’s novum is taken to absurd extremes: not only is the setting strange and often hostile, the works are studded with literal detritus, objects so strange and unfathomable that they act as the gravitational pits around which plot must twist, but which themselves remain essentially unknown and unchanged. This particular book is about two men (and a talking pyrokinetic mutant dog), one tracking the other, in a unsurprisingly Soviet future earth.

Powr Mastrs by C.F. (Picturebox)

Good lord is this shit bonkers. This is the first in a series of, what, three books now? I don’t think I can describe the plot of this beautiful, strange graphic novel. There are arrows and wells and like a squid god and sexy neighbors and my god. The dialogue is the best. The settings seem designed to break your head. I bought this one at the MFBBF.

The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks (Nightshade)

Don’t forget the M! This is a collection of a few stories and the titular novella, some of which are set in Banks’ fun (if unevenly written) post-scarcity galactic civilization The Culture. It’s a slim but a fantastic introduction to his work. The novella is a pretty good bit of fiction about choosing to be human and what that might mean. Also, great cover. Very space.

The Oxford Authors: Gerard Manley Hopkins edited by Catherine Phillips, series editor Frank Kermode (Oxford)

GMH is the best, of course. This little paperback selects some poetry, some letters and some sermons. They are unfailingly worthwhile. It, too, I picked up at Unnameable. For those books whose provenance I don’t mention, I guess the majority were bought at McNally Jackson. Some were free. Don’t be jealous: that’s the only perk of the job. Well almost.

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