GILEAD BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The main character of Gilead is John Ames, who is a seventy-six year old preacher that lives in a small midwestern town. He has serious heart problems and his doctors tell him that he is nearing the end of his life. His heart could fail at any time. He has spent most of his life unmarried and alone, but in his old age he married a younger woman and they now have a seven year old son. The entire book is a letter from John Ames to his son, a letter to be read when his son grows up. 

For the last few years I've been reading terabytes of disaffected writing about how this world is fucked up and stupid, other people are fucked up and stupid, you yourself are fucked up and stupid and hopeless, and life is nasty, brutish and short etc etc

All those things might be true, but it's nice to read a book with a different perspective. President Obama has said several times that Gilead is one of his favorite books, which fits with what I know of his philosophy and personality. The main character is a kind, morally decent, intelligent person who tries to see the best in people. He wants to appreciate every remaining moment of life he has left. It's a hopeful book, and it's a book that makes you want to be good to other people. It makes cynicism look small and weak and unintelligent. 

In my mind I think about Robinson's novels as being similar to Terrence Malick's movies. They both give me a feeling of awe about reality and this world we live in, the depths of human beings. And they are both very, very beautifully made.

This is an excerpt, which will hopefully express what I mean:

"They say an infant can’t see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes, and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn’t really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any." (excerpt) (excerpt)

BINARY STAR BY SARAH GERARD

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard

This is a short novel about a toxic, co-dependent relationship. The main character struggles with anorexia and her boyfriend is an alcoholic asshole. I felt sympathy for the main character, and I felt almost none for her boyfriend. He's an asshole.

I felt like this book gave me the best insight I've read so far into the mind of someone with severe body dysphoria and anorexia. The descriptions of the wooziness and heart-racing that accompanies going without food were very vivid and actually made me feel physically bad sometimes, they gave me low level anxiety, and I mean that in a very complimentary way. The sense of self-hatred that the main character constantly feels is intense and palpable. She is living in a personal hell. 

I also didn't know about binary star systems before I read this book, and I felt like Gerard did a good job of teaching me about them. The writing is short, clipped, immersive, and page-turning. I think I read the whole book in one sitting. (excerpt)

BIPOLAR COWBOY BY NOAH CICERO

Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

I love the trailer for Bipolar Cowboy, which features several readings from the book. I love the trailer so much that I'm gonna post it below so you can watch it immediately:


 

The poems in this book are an interesting amalgam of Buddhist koans and conversational speech. I thought the poems were very sweet and melancholy and earnest, without being cheesy. The poems are very personal and specific to the author Noah Cicero, but they're also preoccupied with philosophy and trying to make sense of human experience on a grand scale.

The book reminded me a lot of a Japanese phrase: 'mono no aware.' It doesn't have an exact translation in english but wikipedia says it means 'the pathos of things.' It describes the feeling you get when you contemplate the transience and ephemerality of existence, that all things eventually die and change, nothing stays as it is. It is a sad feeling, but it's also a beautiful feeling. Like the sudden blooming and sudden death of the cherry blossoms every year, life is intense and fleeting and full of cycles of death and renewal.

I really appreciated how accessible and honest and emotional the writing was. I wish more poetry collections were like this book. (excerpt)

THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY BY ROBERT BURTON

The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The edition I read was an abridged version that was around 300 pages. The full book is close to 1300 pages.

This book has some of the longest sentences I've read, and some of most tortured and extravagant syntax I've read. That's awesome because it makes the book so weird and different from everything else. Burton's prose has a lot of strange moves and I'm glad I read it, but it was also a pretty frustrating book for me to spend time with. 

I was more attracted to the content, which is just as strange and goes all over the place. I did read an abridged version, but based on what I know about the book it seems like most of it just meanders all over the place, from subject to subject and anecdote to anecdote. It's supposed to be about 'melancholy' but it ends up being about everything. The best way to describe the book is that it's an encyclopedia of European civilization.

It's a funny book...it doesn't read like Tao Lin, but the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking wouldn't it be awesome if one day Tao Lin ended up writing a gigantic rambling 2,000 page book like this. This book reminds me somewhat of the long sentences in Taipei, where every tiny nuance gets qualified, and the qualification gets further parsed into several more qualifications which get dissected down into molecule and atom levels of nuance until they finally resolve themselves in a kind of blurry shrug. (excerpt)

THE END OF NIGHT BY PAUL BOGARD

The End of Night: Searching For Natural Darkness In an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard

This is a non-fiction book about light pollution. I wanted to read a book about this subject because in The Pillow Book, Shonagon spends so much time rapturously describing moonlight, fireflies, lanterns, embers, coals, and stars--it made me realize that her understanding of night is fundamentally different from mine. When night comes around, all I need to do is turn on a few switches (or a few screens) and my life is once again swallowed up in light.

Bogard talks about the history of public lighting, starting with the great European capitals, and he talks about the advent of electric light. Most of the book is focused on light pollution in the United States. US cities have had public lighting for some time, but most of the US remained in the dark well into the 1930s, when FDR created the Rural Electrification Administration. 

Bogard focuses a lot of attention on Las Vegas, where the brightest light in the world exists (at the top of the Luxor Pyramid--a light so bright that it has created its own mini-ecosystem of birds and bats that feast on the giant numbers of insects it attracts). The lights of Las Vegas bleed into the desert and into national parks that are hundreds of miles away.

There are several national parks in the US where you can still see the night sky fully exposed. Bogard's description of these places make me depressed, because I've never seen the sky like that. On clear nights, the Milky Way is so bright that it casts a shadow. With the naked eye, you can see a distance of 2.2 million light years into outer space. That's something I'd like to see before I die. I felt very informed by this book, I learned a lot.

RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN BY DENIS JOHNSON

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson

I feel like when Denis Johnson is at his best he's pretty much untouchable, and he's at his best for a lot of this novel. It's about a burnt-out, suicidal man who gets stranded in a small Cape Cod resort town. The plot is difficult to sum up neatly, but it includes working as a private investigator, transvestites, and conspiracy theories. 

It's a funny book and it's surprising. Like most Denis Johnson books, the prose is top notch. There's an atmosphere of religious apocalypse woven through the whole thing, and ultimately I think of it as a religious book in the weirdest possible way. I think Jesus' Son is my favorite Denis Johnson book, then Angels, and then this one. (excerpt)

THE PILLOW BOOK BY SEI SHONAGON

The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (translated by Meredith McKenney)

The usual description of this book goes something like 'it's like a thousand year old blog'--but that really is what it's like. I kept thinking about Megan Boyle the whole time I was reading it. 

The Pillow Book is the diary of a 10th century Japanese lady of the court. But it's more like a blog, not a diary. Diaries are private, and it's clear that The Pillow Book is written for an audience, although it is a very small and specialized audience, aka other members of the court. 

Throughout the book Shonagon tells stories and gossip, describes her days and weeks, and gives the reader long lists of things.

Some of her lists include:
+Things That People Despise
+Things That Give a Pathetic Impression
+Rare Things
+Awkward Things
+Boring Things
+Things That Should Not Be Seen By Firelight
+Things That Are Unpleasant To Hear
+Things That Should Be Large

And on and on and on, for 400 plus pages. Some parts are boring and some are interesting. Most are interesting. She seems like the type of person I would enjoy having as a friend. And she lived a thousand years ago, which is pretty cool. (excerpt) (excerpt)