I'm dedicating to a reading blitz for June: complete one book (or magazine) every day. We'll see how it goes.
- Jame Bond: VARGR by Warren Ellis and Jason Masters. Excellent management of space and action. Action (the genre) is really about moving through space: setting and props.
- She Hulk by Rainbow Rowell. Favorite parts: Thundra and Shulkie's fight club; all the super clients stuffed into her cupboard office, and Jack of Heart's legal pad ("What I know: 1) [blank]; Who I trust to find out what happened to me: 1)Jennifer 2) Reference librarians")
- James Bond: Eidolon. Bond is uncomfortably violent. A device of isolating the inside of a blow (karate chop, bullet, whatever) both distances the violence and highlights Bond's analytical sociopathy.
- NYer of 5/20/24. Alex Ross on neglected Jewish composers of Central Europe: Alexander Zemlinsky (Der Zwert); Erwin Schulhoff (Sonata Erotica, Funf Pittorsken, The Communist Manifesto); Erich Korngold (Sympony in F Sharp)
- DaVinci's Bicycle by Guy Davenport. "Islanders study the newspaper carefuller than most.” Faves: "Au Tombeau Charles Fourier," "Invention of Photography in Toledo," "Ithaka."
- NYer of May 27, 2024. Apparently 85-year old FF Copolla's Megalopolis has a scene that requires a live actor to deliver a monologue.
- Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
- Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Breezy, quippy, light. As Space Opera is to Eurovision, so is this novel to Bond villainy. But shorter, and I am conversant in Bond villainy.
- The Nation of May 2024. GG Marquez's last work of fiction was written under the burden of dementia.
- NYer of June 10 2024. Galchen article on a course on existential risk. Student majoring in "How do we agreeably disagree?"
- Vintage Munro by Alice Munro. All hits no misses: "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage"; "In Sight of the Lake"; "Differently";| "Carried Away"; | "Progress of Love"; "The Moons of Jupiter"
- NYer of Feb 12 & 19"the stoner-adjacent cadence of someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest" (Hannah Goldfield on vinegar maker Chris Crawford)
- How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. A set of linked stories about a pandemic-struck world that takes an odd turn. And then an even odder turn.
- NYer of June 17, 2024. Ye's crazy expensive obsession with modernist architecture.
- Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
- Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
It did not go as planned. But I finished two very long books.
