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.

I bought Lucky Loser — subtitled “How D—-d T—p Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” — just before the election, hoping we would be lucky and he would lose. After that I kinda lost interest in it, but in the last few days I’ve found myself drawn back; it’s sort of like Godzilla –1, where you see the origin of the monster, in this case the walking, talking orange turd who’s currently an even-money bet to end 250 years of American constitutional democracy.

I’m treating it as a companion piece to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I now feel like I have four years to get through. Though maybe it won’t take that long. Were I an ambitious sort I’d set myself a goal of finishing by inauguration day (gag) — but that seems like a long shot. All in the fullness of time.

Finally, I’ve been limping along through VALIS, which I now remember — I first read it sometime back in the mid-90s — is a bit of a slog. This was PKD’s first published novel after his breakdown/epiphany/whatever, and he was trying to grapple with what had happened to him, as he would for the rest of his life. He appears in VALIS both as the (unnamed) writer/narrator and as the main character, Horselover Fat. (“Philip” is Greek for friend of horses; “Dick” is German for fat.)

There is a touching vulnerability in Phil’s admission of his own mental confusion:

What Fat claimed was — well, Fat claimed plenty. I must not start any sentence with “What Fat claimed was.” During the years — outright years! — that he labored on his exegesis, Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting, and more fucked.

But VALIS also gets pretty deep into the weeds, with numerous excerpts from the exegesis clogging whatever narrative flow it manages to get going. This is not entertainment, it’s writing as survival mechanism; and having spent most of October babble-blogging in an attempt to stay sane, I can’t hold it against him.

Forgiveness, of self and of others — where appropriate — seems to be the order of the day. Spread the word.