Tag Archives: the floating library

TFL #61

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This installment of The Floating Library is part book review essay about an illustrated children’s book called What Is Punk? by Eric Morse and Anny Yi and part personal essay about my daughter’s indifference to the music I love. An excerpt:

…Do I really want my daughter to love punk rock? After all, punk rock and substance abuse go hand-in-hand. You could say that about any kind of music scene but I don’t think my friends who listen to country (oh wait I don’t have any friends who listen to country) or other genres have been to as many funerals as I have. I really don’t want my daughter dropping f-bombs and calling me a fascist when I tell her to make her bed.

Read the rest oft he excerpt here. 

TFL #60

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The Floating Library sets sail on the Sea of Short Stories with Amelia Gray, Rivka Galchen and Rebecca Makkai.  An excerpt:

While Gray’s stories are often distinguished by their darkness, they are buoyed by a sharp sense of humor. In “Go for It and Raise Hell” a Camaro driving New Mexican terrorizes his patch of desert with his pitiless worldview:

“Carl is coated in the filth of the world. Carl does not believe that the meek shall inherit. He knows that you never know what is enough until you find out what is more than enough.”

When he isn’t “flipping endless J-turns” or hitting on waitresses, Carl imagines the movie of his life that he calls, GO FOR IT AND RAISE HELL, and when is that ever not excellent advice?

Read the rest of the review.

TFL #59

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This was a book I could have gone on and on about. I didn’t talk about it in my review, but it’s really interesting how the book’s themes dovetail with Karolina’s previous novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms. And the ending really put me in mind of David Goodis’s pulp masterpiece The Burglar. An excerpt:

The Invaders is a masterful work of literary fiction with the pulse of a thriller and an ending that’s right out of a pulp novel: lyrical yet unstintingly unsentimental and as pitiless as a sunburn on a cloudy day.  

Read the rest of the review.

TFL #58

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The Floating Library takes a look at a pair of novels with similar subjects and identical titles: Junkie Love (a memoir) by Joe Clifford and Junkie Love (a novel) by Phil Shoenfelt. An excerpt:

I’ve heard stories of writers coming up with the “perfect” title for his or her book, only to discover that it had already been taken; but I’d never met two authors who had books with the same title until this year.

Read the rest of the review. 

TFL #57

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The Floating Library tunes into Daniel Manoney’s Sunblind Almost Motorcrash by Spork Preess: 

If you love music, but the prospect of reading a collection of record reviews strikes you as a less-than-thrilling use of your time, Daniel Mahoney just might make you reconsider.

His new book Sunblind Almost Motorcrash, published by Spork Press, collects a series of imaginary record reviews by bands that don’t exist. (If this review was in an audio format, you’d hear the sound of a needle scratching a record here.) That’s right: the songs, records, bands—even the record labels—are all products of Mahoney’s prodigious imagination.

Read the rest of the review.

TFL# 56

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The Floating Library stays close to home port for a look at a trio of exceptional debut novels by Andy Roe, Celeste Ng and Shanna Mahin, who was reviewed in the New York Times last week. An excerpt:

Oh! You Pretty Things is also about class, but you’d be hard pressed to find a class struggle this entertaining. When the story prepares you for a Hollywood ending, the long-suffering, acid-tongued narrator (“If I were a cutter, I’d have crop circles on my thighs”) brings the funny.

Read the rest of the review. 

TFL #55

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The Floating Library is becalmed by a less-than-stellar rock and roll memoir by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon: 

Unlike Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Friends, with its narrow focus on her years as a struggling poet with her friend and confidant Robert Mapplethorpe in pre-punk New York City, Gordon attempts to describe too much and frequently falls short. She occasionally employs tired and predictable language, particularly when describing the way her adopted home has changed over the decades. “New York City today is a city on steroids.”

Read the rest of the review. 

   

TFL #52

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The Floating Library is besieged by sirens with reviews of Dorothy Iannone’s You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends and Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star. 

Iannone’s work combines text and image in arresting fashion. While her figures are typically clothed, or at least ornamented, their genitalia are almost always on display. While the text describes erotic scenes, it’s seldom vulgar—more Marguerite Duras than Anaïs Nin—and more often then not, the words are used to convey stories, recipes, anecdotes and aphorisms of a nonsexual nature. The result is something that appears at first blush to be as shocking as Raymond Pettibon, only more poetic and much more polite.

Read the rest of the review here.

A Year in Books: 2014

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As in years past, and with the help of my Goodreads account, I’ve made a list of all 56 of the books that I read in 2014. It’s interesting to put these lists together because it illuminates things that I hadn’t given much thought to over the course of the year. For instance, I didn’t read much in the way of history or historical fiction – with one notable exception. I also didn’t read any of the expensive art books hogging my shelves, which I explicitly resolved to do last year.

That wasn’t the only thing I failed to do. Last year, exactly half the books I read were by female writers. This year the numbers skew more heavily toward men: 34 vs. 22. That’s “only” a six-book swing; but I strive for equity. I need to do better and will do better in 2015.

For this year’s list, I did away with a few categories and added some new ones. I’m reading a lot more books by musicians mainly because I’m working on one. I also added a category for books about sailors because there will always be room for nautical adventure in my life.

Remember, this isn’t a ranking but a record of my reading for the year and if I reviewed a title in The Floating Library or Los Angeles Times, I included the link. I reviewed a bit more than I have in the past and I hope that trend continues. In fact, my final installment of 2014 for The Floating Library will be my fiftieth column. Keep in mind these books weren’t all published in 2014 (though many of them were) they are simply the books I read during the 2014 calendar year. So here it is: 

Books That Made Me Question the Worthiness of the Human Project

Canicule by Louis Armand

300,000,000 by Blake Butler

The Kills by Richard House

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson

The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour

Newtown: An American Tragedy by Matthew Lysiak

Rivers by Michael Farris Smith

It was a year of big bleak books and The Kills and 300,000,000 were the bleakest by far. It’s interesting that they both look to Roberto Bolano’s 2666 for inspiration. Louis Armand may be unfamiliar to many American readers – he’s an Australian living in Prague – but he’s published three novels over the last three years and they’re all excellent. 

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Books That Reaffirmed It

Made to Break by D. Foy

Deep Ellum by Brandon Hobson

Books About Sailors

Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer

McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh

One thought occurred to me over and over again while reading Otessa Moshfegh’s mini-masterpiece about a drunken sailor: Why the hell didn’t I write this book? (Perhaps because I lived it?) McGlue, to my mind, is just as good as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, a book that is never very far from my thoughts. I suspect I’ll be reading McGlue again soon.

Books About Music & Musicians

The Dirty Version: On Stage, in the Studio, and in the Streets with Ol’ Dirty Bastard by Buddha Monk

Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone by Marky Ramone

The Cure: Ten Imaginary Years by Steve Sutherland

Books That Zapped Me Into the Past

Sweetness #9 by Stephan Eirik Clark

Books That Anticipate the Future

Cairo by Louis Armand

Lock In by John Scalzi

Books That Don’t Rhyme

Scare Crone by Melissa Broder

Piano Rats by Franki Elliot

Dear Lil Wayne by Lauren Ireland

Death-Defying Acts by Erin Keane

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany

I picked up almost all of these poetry collections at AWP and they were all memorable. I especially enjoyed the despairing humor in Ireland’s collection, which is somewhat reminiscent of Wenderoth’s Letter’s to Wendy’s and Mullany’s aphorisms are genius. Melissa Broder’s Scare Crone is really something else. There are poets and there are people who write poetry. What does that mean? I don’t know but when I read Broder’s work regions of my brain light up that would otherwise remain dark. 

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Books That Make Me Wanna Commit Some Crimes

Beware Beware by Steph Cha

The White Van by Patrick Hoffman

The Point by Gerard Brennan

The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

Not for Nothing by Stephen Graham Jones

Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark

Books Bursting with Sex

Spent: A Memoir by Antonia Crane

The Shimmering Go-Between by Lee Klein

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

Excavation: A Memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz

Books That Were Even Stranger Than I Thought They’d Be

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa

Goodis: A Life in Black and White by Philippe Garnier

Yoko Ogawa’s short story collection Revenge was one of the my favorite books in 2013 and I loved the two books I read this year. I’m saving one more for next year and then I’m going to have to start hunting down stories to read on the Internet. Sadly, most of her books have not been translated into English.

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Books with Beautiful/Ugly Pictures in Them

Dal Tokyo by Gary Panter

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I Think I Am in Friend Love with You by Yumi Sakugawa

Books That Are Difficult to Classify

The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs

Young God by Katherine Morris Faw

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard

How to Get into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika Wurth 

Books With Short Stories in Them

Backswing by Aaron Burch

Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria

Black Candies: See Through edited by Ryan Bradford

Esther Stories by Peter Orner

What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell

Books I Recommend Without Reservation

Novel: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Short Story Collection: Karate Chop by Dorothe Nors 

Poetry: The Yearning Feed by Paul Lopez

Nonfiction: Call Me Burroughs: A Life by Barry Miles

Book That Had the Biggest Impact

Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America by Damien Ober

For most of the year I thought Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum would be the one. His haunting look at a family in crisis has stayed with me in a way that most books don’t. Then I got my hands on Ober’s amazing novel. Hugely ambitious and mind-bendingly high concept, the book tells the story of every signer of the Declaration of Independence at the moment of his death. That’s over 50 narratives spread out over 60 years. But wait there’s more. The America these Founding Father’s inhabit is not our own: they’ve battled three iterations of a plague spread by the Internet, interference from alien species, and a sea monster. That sounds like a farcical comic book of a novel. It’s not. It’s strangely moving and hugely compelling. Usually, the novel that makes the biggest impact is one that shows me a way forward in my own work. Not this time. While Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America shattered my thinking as to what a novel can be and do, I’m content to admire it and marvel at how it was put together. (Ober offers some clues in this interview we conducted at The Rumpus.) Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America, was published by Equus Press, a publishing company based in the UK that also publishes Louis Armand’s novels. They’re beautiful books, but they’re hard to find. If I were an enterprising American indie publisher, I’d look for a way to get Ober and Armand’s books published over here…

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In 2015 I’m looking forward to reading more crime, mysteries and noir. I’m  also going to be reading more memoirs by musicians (please send me your recommendations). At the moment, I’m reading new a novel by Barry Gifford, a writer who had an enormous influence on me, both in his work and in the work he championed when he put so many out-of-print pulp writers back in circulation with Black Lizard. 

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I’ve always been drawn to stories of crime and mystery, but lately I’ve been reading more books shelved in those categories. Beware Beware by L.A. writer Steph Cha is a classic mystery inspired by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe with a feminist twist.

Much like her fictional forebear, Philip Marlowe, Song drinks heavily, smokes like a chimney and calls Los Angeles home. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s famous private investigator, Song is young, female and Korean-American. In other words, she’s not like Marlowe at all.

I don’t want to say too much more than what’s in the review, but I will say this: the ending really flattened me. I don’t read a lot of series fiction, but I’m definitely looking forward to Juniper Song’s next adventure.