Books Acquired:
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Progress Made:
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme
Shogun, James Clavell
The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, Richie Unterberger

Books Finished:
Take a Girl Like You, Kingsley Amis
The Beast Must Die, Nicholas Blake
When the Game Was War, Rich Cohen

I had high expectations for The Beast Must Die, which was recommended thusly by the “Read Like the Wind” column in the NYT magazine:

Murder mysteries tend to fall into either a whodunit or a howcatchem structure. The first is well-known. In the second, the perpetrator is revealed at the plot’s beginning and suspense arises from finding out if and how they’ll be apprehended. (Anyone who has seen an episode of Columbo will be familiar with the charms of a howcatchem.) This novel is a third entity: a fusion of the two. 

And it mostly fulfilled them, being at once erudite and readable, playful and suspenseful. I was a little let down by the ending, but at 190 economical pages Beast felt worthwhile. Rereading the Times piece just now, I was reminded that Nicholas Blake is the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, Daniel’s father; I don’t know why knowing that makes me happy, but it does.

On the other hand I had no particular expectations for Take a Girl Like You, which I picked up on a whim from the free box at the Coffee Break a few months back. (That’s also where I got the Fitzgerald book, which I hope to tackle soon.) Having read none of Sir Kingsley’s novels, I knew him only as the father of Martin and the author of Everyday Drinking, an amusing if somewhat ephemeral collection of alcoholic nonfiction. But the novel turned out to be delightful — arch and funny and slyly sexy and just British enough to feel like a dispatch from an alien land, not enough to serve as an obstacle to comprehension or enjoyment.

Alcohol plays a major role in Take a Girl as well; all of the characters drink heavily as a matter of course, with consequences both comic and tragic. (In roughly equal measures, often with no clear dividing line between the two.) I drank it down like a bottle of top-drawer bubbly, leaving behind for the nonce the cosmic (Divine Invasion) and the epic (Shogun) — the latter of which is proving less ideal as summer reading than I initially hoped. Too many characters and too many intrigues and just too much all around. I stalled out about halfway through its 1100 pages, and don’t know when or whether I shall resume. Maybe I should just stick with the TV show, which is equally confusing but has a lovely color palette and some beautiful women.

I gave up almost immediately on The Fortress of Solitude, which for whatever reason I just wasn’t feeling. I’m not sure if it was Jonathan’s fault or mine. After the efficient drollery of Take a Girl Like You, it felt ponderous, and in my advancing age I’ve given myself permission to bail on a book if I feel like it.

I’ve also given myself permission to be in the middle of as many books as I want at any given time. So Barthelme’s collection of absurdist stories, Reiss’s book about Alexandre Dumas’s father, Shields’s Vonnegut biography, and Unterberger’s ginormous VU reference all remain active but not urgent.

The other book I did manage to finish was Rich Cohen’s book about the NBA in the late 1980s. This was not one of those sports tomes that bends over backwards to show you how smart it is — it’s just a book about basketball, and kept me entertained while I waited for this to happen: