Book Thread. I have nothing good to read.

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Paul Auster died today...met him at Politics and Prose a decade ago. One of the best writers EVER!!!!!!

I first met Paul in Paris in the early 1970s, then he & his then wife Lydia Davis (a *much* better writer than Paul) stayed with me in SF in the late 70s when they were in town to do a couple of readings (of which at leat one was in a series i was coordinating).

He & I also read together a few times in the late '80s. Last time i saw him was at a funeral a decade ago -- that's what happens when you age: you meet your old friends at funerals!

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Paul Auster died today...met him at Politics and Prose a decade ago. One of the best writers EVER!!!!!!

Auster and now Alice Munro.

Auster when he was good, was very good. A bunch of clunkers, but The Invention of Solitude is beautiful and profound and haunting.

And Munro … good god, so many incredible stories. Stories as rich as any novel.

I just read Kerry Howley’s Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs — good, if a little sloppy in places (it was clearly written quickly), and captures the absurdity of the past 20 years of our surveillance state and shadow government.

I’m now reading Imperial by William T. Vollman, who’s like a cross between Steinbeck and Pynchon — I love his earnestness and yearning and spurning of literary fashion — and Telluride by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. Funny and weird and unsettling.

Honestly I like even his clunkers. All of his books are really smartly written. Like I loved the NY Trilogy but Moon Palace is probably my favorite book of his. That book is just awesome.

Paul's work is mostly an nth-generation rehash of European modernism. if you are drawn to it, then you might want to look at the work that inspired it.

You might start with The Man Without Qualities by Musil.

I'm on the road but will be back in this thread with a longer list in the next day or so....