These are the books I read in 2023, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion. Books of the Year: The Life Before Us by Romain Gary (fiction), and Where Are the Customers’ Yachts by Fred Schwed (non-fiction). My Library at LibraryThing Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Literature
2022: The Year in Books
These are the books I read in 2022, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion. Books of the Year: On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleža (fiction) and Night Train by Martin Amis (contemporary fiction). My Library at LibraryThing Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews: Night Train by Martin Amis
A police officer investigates the apparent suicide of a longtime friend. There are layers here. Peel them away and each one is darker than the last. If you have someone on your gift list who you’d like to see become so depressed that they end their own life, give them this book. Rating: Read more →
Winter Palace
Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder. I spent my second quarter-century Losing what I had learnt at university. And refusing to take in what had happened since. Now I know none of the names in the public prints, And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces And swearing I’ve never been in certain places. It will be worth it, if in the end I manage To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow. — Philip Larkin, “Winter Palace” Read more →
Love Songs in Age
She kept her songs, they kept so little space, The covers pleased her: One bleached from lying in a sunny place, One marked in circles by a vase of water, One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, And coloured, by her daughter – So they had waited, till, in widowhood She found them, looking for something else, and stood Relearning how each frank submissive chord Had ushered in Word after sprawling hyphenated word, And the unfailing sense of being young Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein That hidden freshness sung, That certainty of time laid up in store As when she played them first. But, even more, The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, Broke out, to show Its bright incipience sailing above, Still promising to solve, and satisfy, And set unchangeably in order. So To pile them back, to cry, Was hard, without lamely admitting how… Read more →
Maiden Name
Marrying left your maiden name disused. Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, Your voice, and all your variants of grace; For since you were so thankfully confused By law with someone else, you cannot be Semantically the same as that young beauty: It was of her that these two words were used. Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one, Lying just where you left it, scattered through Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon – Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly. No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone, It means what we feel now about you then: How beautiful you were, and near, and young, So vivid, you might still be there among Those first few days, unfingermarked again. So your old name shelters our faithfulness, Instead of… Read more →
Places, Loved Ones
No, I have never found The place where I could say This is my proper ground, Here I shall stay; Nor met that special one Who has an instant claim On everything I own Down to my name; To find such seems to prove You want no choice in where To build, or whom to love; You ask them to bear You off irrevocably, So that it’s not your fault Should the town turn dreary, The girl a dolt. Yet, having missed them, you’re Bound, none the less, to act As if what you settled for Mashed you, in fact; And wiser to keep away From thinking you still might trace Uncalled-for to this day Your person, your place. — Philip Larkin, “Places, Loved Ones” Read more →
Molly Brodak
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It Wasn’t Much Good for Reading, But . . .
I recently read Omon Ra, a Russian novel that I’d heard good things about. I didn’t really like it at all. This afternoon, I saw some kind of a large black pincher bug on the living room carpet. My copy of Omon Ra was lying nearby and I picked it up and smashed the bug with it. So I can’t say that the book was a complete waste of money . . . Read more →
Next, Please
Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear Sparkling armada of promises draw near. How slow they are! And how much time they waste, Refusing to make haste! Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked, Each rope distinct, Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s No sooner present than it turns to past. Right to the last We think each one will heave to and unload All good into our lives, all we are owed For waiting so devoutly and so long. But we are wrong: Only one ship is seeking us, a black- Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence. In her… Read more →
Going
There is an evening coming in Across the fields, one never seen before, That lights no lamps. Silken it seems at a distance, yet When it is drawn up over the knees and breast It brings no comfort. Where has the tree gone, that locked Earth to the sky? What is under my hands, That I cannot feel? What loads my hands down? — Philip Larkin, “Going” Read more →
A Moment of Love
Everything was worn out about people: they complained about debts; they were involved in gossip; they had five-storied houses built; they traded in large objects; they bought ships, mines, vineyards; at bridge parties they lamented worriedly and falsely about being too busy; everybody talked about his work, whereas, in fact, nobody did anything; people played bridge and for whole nights groaned for a moment of love. — Miroslav Krleža, On the Edge of Reason Read more →
The Ballad of Joking Jesus
Goodbye goodbye write down all I said Tell Tom Dick and Harry I rose from the dead What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly and all of it’s breezy goodbye now goodbye — James Joyce Read more →
God Hates Children?
“God hates children.” For a moment Viking Man is too lost in his reverie to have heard, but then he turns to the other man. “Can’t say I ever thought of it that way, vicar.” “God is always killing children in the Bible, or threatening to,” says Vikar. “He kills His own child.” Viking Man nods slowly. “That’s a hell of an observation,” he says. — Steve Erickson, Zeroville Read more →
I Think I Could Turn and Live With Animals
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. — Walt Whitman Read more →
2021: The Year in Books
These are the books I read in 2021, roughly in the order listed. The ratings are mine. They don’t represent a consensus of opinion. Books of the Year: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (fiction), Zeroville by Steve Erickson (contemporary fiction) and Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell (non-fiction). My Library at LibraryThing Read more →
Joan Didion, 1934-2021
I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it. — Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That” RIP Joan Didion Read more →
Hollywood 1969
“You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM — all of which will be run by companies that have nothing to do with pictures — who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather — which means we’re talking Dawn of… Read more →
The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position. — Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. — Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment