by Percival Everett

This book had me hooked in the first paragraph. I was sampling various “top books of the century” as per the NYT, and I had just sampled about four in a row where the narrator was a writer. One of my peeves. If the narrator isn’t a writer, s/he’s an artist, i.e. a thinly veiled writer. This book opens with, “I am writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer.”

This book is very odd, as is its narrator. I’d call it ‘experimental.’ Enough to scare me at little at first. But it was so worth the ride. It’s going to be the best novel I read this year, I can predict. But I’m afraid of its being too politically incorrect to recommend to a lot of the people I know.

“Now a major motion picture!” Which I definitely will not go see.

Main thread: Thelonious Ellison is a writer of abstruse mostly unread books. He is black but uninterested in the fact. He becomes incensed when an atrocious book of denigrating black stereotypes becomes a runaway best-seller and decides to write his own awful book of denigrating black stereotypes, making it a broad parody. But it’s taken seriously and makes him millions.

Another thread: violent deaths of his father and sister, and slow loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s. I can relate to the difficulties of parental decline, simultaneous genuine grief coupled with genuine selfish thoughts.

Thelonious would probably be called “on the spectrum” or “neurodivergent.” Also “brilliant.” The writing is all of the above and I adored it.

by Yuval Noah Harari

(Re-read)

I literally had trouble putting this down when I first read it.

Upon revisiting about 10 years later, I’d say it definitely starts stronger than it ends.

(I mean, here we are.)

by Andrew O’Hagan

This book was long, confusing, and long. I did get a hang of who all the characters were by the end, but it’s the kind of book that gives you a “cast of characters” list up front. I NEVER use such lists. I refuse to do that kind of work for a novel. If I can’t keep track of who’s who, you’re doing a bad job as a novelist.

Reading it on Kindle I had no realistic idea how long it was going to be. If I’d picked it up in real life, I probably would have put it down again.

I can appreciate it as a pretty well-written piece of lit. But it was kind of a downer. Not many good things happen.

by Lucy Grealy

So much pain.

This is a childhood cancer memoir, though the wonderful afterword by Ann Patchett does not want you to think of it as a cancer memoir, but as a beautiful piece of writing. OK, but it’s about a girl who went to chemo every single week for two years.

And SPOILER alert. I found myself thinking, “I can’t believe they killed her father and both her horses!!!” I don’t know why my mind phrased it that way, “they”, as if it were a movie, rather than a true story. But yeah. It’s not bad enough she has bone cancer and disfigurement.

I was planning to go on to Ann Patchett’s TRUTH AND BEAUTY next, which is about the adult friendship between Patchett and Grealy, but I just felt like I’d had enough. So much pain.