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.

by Chris Van Tulleken

(Re-Read)

I read this just last year, but re-read because I am newly resolved to stop eating UPF, no little exceptions here and there which then let the big exceptions sneak in. No more diet juice, sugar-free hard candies, weird bottled drinks.

by Bill Maher

Laughed out loud super-frequently. What great therapy.

by Cixin Liu

(As far as I can tell, it’s pronounced “Tsih shin loo”.)

I don’t usually read science fiction, and I have no recollection what brought me to this story. I do enjoy reading Chinese authors; so I probably came across some tempting description, like “futuristic Chinese Lord of the Flies.”

The premise is – well, a futuristic, Chinese “Lord of the Flies”, caused by a supernova that destroys the chromosomes of everyone over 13, gradually killing them, leaving Earth in the hands of children.

I was most swept up in the first third or so of the book that focused on China, and the immediate aftermath of leaving the children in charge. An extremely brief period of normalcy, followed by chaos, more normalcy, then laziness, rebellion, and giving up… just when the 13-year-old leaders think they’ve hit upon a way out, we switch focus from China to the global arena.

Then things get nightmarish and violent. I thought the book gave short shrift to the role of girls in the Supernova Era. They would be half the population and I can’t see them going along with the war games and such. I also didn’t get how the ending jumped from Point A to Point B.

(re-read)

This book was already chock-full of post-its, and I added a few more.

“[W]hat you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much… the universe absolutely could not care less.”

by Nellie Bowles

About the excesses of the progressives, from someone who was one. Extremely valuable, important, gripping, convincing, and depressing. The reviews are unfair. And I need to stop reading about cancel culture.

by Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott

Greg Lukianoff did a great job with Jonathan Haidt in THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, so let’s give him a shot with the analogous CANCELING. Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer who is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free speech rights equally for all comers, “left” or “right.” And I do believe, as Haidt says in his forward, that he has “a big heart.” Unfortunately, the facts of today’s Cancel Culture mean he has to spend a lot more time documenting the abuses today by activists on the “left.”

Why do our young people behave like this? Nowadays, it seems everyone is a Nazi. Talk about your black & white thinking. Every speaker with any non-liberal affiliation has to be shouted down as if he were Hitler himself. I mean, if Hitler were invited to participate in a talk on your campus, would you protest in a respectful manner? Or would you shout, “My god, people this is HITLER!” That’s where we are. Since everyone is Hitler, there’s no responsible action to take other than screaming, disrupting, or preventing the event from ever taking place in the first place.

Here near my own home turf, at UVM, this year, the planned commencement speaker was canceled (literally). US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, protested for her vote against a Gaza cease-fire, was called by activists a “genocidal” “war criminal.”

She’s not a genocidal war criminal. She voted against a cease-fire in a complicated war. She’s not Hitler.

So it’s all come to this. Sometimes I think about the sweep of generations, each of us more self-centered and ‘coddled’ than the previous, and feel the inevitability of it all.