Reading Report, November 2024
Books Acquired:
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner & Suzanne Craig
Progress Made:
Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner & Suzanne Craig
The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Books Finished:
Dead Babies, Martin Amis
November was not a good month for reading, but I’ve pre-emptively pardoned myself for anything I did or failed to do in those heartbreaking weeks. I did manage to put one book up on the board to keep my streak alive: Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, which was short and entertaining — though I can’t 100% recommend it, as it was a grim piece of work that started dark and just got darker.
Though it appears to be set in the 1990s, DB was written in 1973 and is clearly meant as a warning about where that decade’s decadence is heading. Martin does not approve and his characters pay the price as a weekend-long party becomes a drug-fueled bloodbath. There is comedy along the way, but it is humor of the deepest ebon.
I’m almost done with The Last Good Kiss, a boozy, hard-boiled detective novel that aspires to be Literature and sometimes even gets there. The first paragraph of the book will give you some of the flavor:
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
But it also suffers from what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “too much plot gettin’ in the way of the story”; it zigs and zags and zigs again until the reader gets dizzy. I get the sense the ending will be disappointing and I’m in no hurry to get there. Still, I have to thank Mr. Crumley; every minute I spent reading The Last Good Kiss was a minute spent mercifully not thinking of Other Things.
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