Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book a lot. It's only a little bit about the author keeping a diary, it's actually about time, and life, death, and motherhood. It conjured up my horror at our our ceaseless march towards not just death but oblivion. I'm a complicated type of Christian that doesn't think the universe owes me eternity, but rather that I owe the universe a lot of sacrifice to others. So to me, as to many others, the oblivion is a real thing that makes it hard to justify the little daily acts, and losing memories- mental or physical- is very much a step towards that oblivion.

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She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The central problem in this play is that Mr. Marlow believes himself to be too modest to speak to women of a high class. He states his trouble in this way, “[a]n impudent fellow may counterfeit modesty, but I’ll be hanged if a modest man can ever counterfeit impudence.” But we soon learn that he's a complete douchebag. But I think that's the point. Hilarity ensues! And it's actually pretty funny.

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Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain

Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Most of these stories didn't pass the test of time, but I enjoyed "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," about some Confederate soldiers who avoid fighting in the Civil War.

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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There were 22 stories in this collection, and I especially enjoyed 5 of them: They're Not Your Husband, Neighbors, What's in Alaska, Bicycles, and the title story. Carver seems especially good at the sadness of disappointment though Bicycles, in particular, seemed like the opposite- about a boy's admiration of his father. I have been told I need to read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

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No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very dark and funny. Full of great lines exploring the simple tortures of everyday life.

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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really want everyone to stop whatever they're doing and read this book. After reading this book, climate change now overshadows all my other concerns. It is worse than I thought, and of course, I knew it was already currently happening but he compiles the data on current natural disasters in a way that clearly separates them from previous weather events.

I moved to Nebraska a year ago. Nebraska is not even mentioned in the book. And yet, we have what are apparently new permanent bodies of water since the flooding events that have occurred since I moved here a year ago. They look like lakes or little rivers and they've survived even our record-breaking hot summer. There were multiple floods in the Spring, and the flooding in March cost over a billion in damages, a lot of which I think has not actually been repaired. See: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705408364/nebraska-faces-over-1-3-billion-in-flood-losses. The book was already out by then, but I bet we still wouldn't have made it into the book because so many more damaging weather events are occurring all the time now.



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The Houseguest by Kim Brooks

The Houseguest by Kim Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel is full of beautiful writing. I'm looking forward to whatever Brooks writes next.

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Runaway by Alice Munro

Runaway by Alice Munro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great writing, but I didn't find myself passionately loving any of these short stories the way I sometimes love stories.

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Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken

Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those rare short story collections where all the stories are good. There are nine stories and my favorites are the first one, It's Bad Luck to Die, about a man who tattoos his wife a great deal, and Some Have Entertained Angels Unaware, which is both moving and hilarious. I also really liked June, Secretary of State, and the title story.

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300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love these little huge sentences. It’s a perfect collection of aphorisms for a 40-year-old “privileged” American which is not to say without our own particular type of despair.

"There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you."




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Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this book tedious to read. I was annoyed at what felt to me to be very inorganic jumping back and forth through time; it didn’t seem like the jumping improved the narrative by giving me the information when I needed it, but just confused the narrative. The book is a little bit of a love letter to New York between 2001-2003 or so. He gets lots of details of New York right, including the 2003 blackout, but seems to miss the mark on 911 itself. It’s not a 911 book, but if you plant your characters right then and there you need to get the weirdness right.

I wasn’t bothered by the wife’s reasons for leaving, I think it was clear that it wasn’t about her fear of living in the city alone, but I was confused about her refusal to discuss it with Hans. Hans is so passive that he doesn’t insist she talk about it, and he never gains any self-awareness about how insane that is.

I found the relationship with Chuck mostly uncomfortable- two people trying to use each other for contrary ends. Which is bad, because the novel is supposed to mostly be about that relationship. O think Han’s relationship with his mentally ill Angel neighbor is more interesting but insufficiently explored.

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Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Rabbit Redux by John Updike
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This a strange book. It takes place in the 1960s, and Rabbit is racist and misogynistic, like a lot of people were/are in real life. Rabbit experiences some growth on the racist front, though Rabbit is so flawed that it's very incomplete. I noticed no growth on his misogynism. More importantly, on the racial front, Updike’s writing is grotesque, even apart from and independently of the inner workings of his the character of Rabbit. I'm not a fan of striking books because they're out-of-date (as this one surely is) because we need to look at what seemed normal in a particular time period to understand where we are now. We are still deeply flawed now, and we need to examine why we've come such a small distance in the last 60 years.

The plot mostly creeped me out and seemed overly outlandish. The description of the book above calls it "sexy" and it's the opposite of sexy. All the sex scenes are sad and horrible to me.

Updike is a really good writer and there's a lot of good writing in this big flawed book. I liked the first book better, though I've heard some people say this is their favorite of the set. I can't say I actually enjoyed this one.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautiful and so sad. I don’t think I’ve ever read a war novel from the perspective of “the enemy” before though maybe something close to that about the Middle East. So brilliantly written, that I assume the translation is excellent.

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The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The beginning was really funny (and sad) but after about two thirds through I got tired of the characters not developing and their situation devolving. Lipsyte is very intelligent and witty, and kudos to you if you get all his jokes. I’m sure so many of his jokes went right over my head, but oh boy will you feel full of yourself when you get some of them. Ha! Ultimately, I thought Don, a minor character, was the most interesting, though I didn’t like the direction his story took. The plot is mostly just a vehicle for satire and who cares what happens to them anyway... not me.

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Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Tampa by Alissa Nutting
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, Nutting is an amazing writer, the writing will cast a dark spell on you keep you turning the pages and plant you so deep inside the brain of her main character Celeste that you will feel your head spin. That said, the plot of the book is pedophilia, so it's super gross. I conceptualized reading this book as reading a horror book. It’s about a beautiful female pedophile and it’s somewhat based on the true story of Debra Lafave. It’s really graphic sexually so that makes it harder to read. Nutting doesn’t do Nabokov’s Lolita's suggestion of sex, she spells it out completely so that we can’t look away from the ugly monster inside the beautiful young woman.

But here are a few things I think make this topic make sense. This actually happens not that infrequently in real life, beautiful young women teachers get arrested for sleeping with 14-16-year-old students. There’s a pretty substantial list of them (google it) and those are just the ones that got caught; probably they don’t all get caught.

Secondly, in a lot of ways, the topic of the book is more about the inside of a sociopath’s brain. It reminded me a lot of the Ted Bundy documentary if it had been from the honest perspective of Ted Bundy. Sociopaths are scary and dangerous because they don’t have the same guardrails of human sympathy, empathy, nor do they possess a built-in moral framework. Can you be incapable of love and be truly human? As the character of Celeste is developed, we see that her only problem is not her perverse sexual desires, she fundamentally doesn't care about right and wrong or human life or anything aside from obtaining her personal desires.

[Light spoilers ahead.] Finally, there’s a lot of truth about how society lets beautiful people get away with so much more than unattractive people. The book also highlights how the legal system frequently blames the victim. Specifically, because the perpetrator is a woman, it kind of flips the script, but some things remain the same. This book, while gruesome to read, definitely made me think about a lot of problems in society.

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A Delicate Aggression by David O. Dowling

A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers' Workshop by David O. Dowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My interest waxed and waned while reading this. As other reviewers mentioned it was more of a collection of biographies about certain teachers and certain students at the Iowa Writers Workshop MFA in three different eras. I was originally hoping to learn more about the actual program, especially the modern era because my husband attended for fiction writing in the early 2000s, but it didn’t provide that. Nonetheless, I found the information about Paul Engle, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson very interesting. Engle created and managed to fund an amazing program and the author is confusingly kind of negative towards him. But overall, I’m glad I read this.

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You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent collection. Almost all the stories are about mental illness with a few exceptions. I especially appreciated “Notes to My Biographer,” “The Good Doctor,” “The Beginnings of Grief,” and “Devotion” (one of the few in the collection not about mental illness). After the first four the stories were harder for me to get through, but still very good.

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The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This feels very real, especially the way she completely loses focus as she experiences depression. It felt very intense to read this.

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Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took two attempts for me to finish this book. The first time I lost interest in the beginning. The second time, I lost interest half-way through and finished it anyway. There's a lot of great writing and I was somewhat engaged in the female characters, but Dick always seemed lacking somehow, and that feeling just increased. I also wasn't interested in the meandering plot. So this was not the most enjoyable read for me.

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The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Um... no. I think it was supposed to be scary, but it wasn't. The implications were gross I think? Or maybe nothing? I don't know, but I could have, maybe should have, skipped this.

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