Johnson’s have the dual affect of making me want to read more, while making want to avert my gaze to the impending tragedies in his characters sad lives. Told with a comic touch to soften the inevitable blows.

I highly recommend Johnson’s books, though they’re not for the feint of heart.

In retrospect I realized I’d read a very positive review of this in the NYT not too long ago. It’s a very short book, comprised of short chapters (or stories), written in a spare style. I was a bit scared on the first couple of pages due to the use of first person plural (which I tend not to like) but I was impressed with the style in which it was used here, and to see the shift to first person singular later on in the book.

I really enjoyed the episodic style of store, and the use of imagery. The scene where the narrator dances in front of a film clip of Niagara Falls, or where the boys fly garbage bag kites are quite stunning.

65 stories by Nabokov in 750 pages. The stories are mostly quite short, and read as somewhat ambiguous moral tales. The book that this reminds me of most is Calvino’s folktales, so I’m using the same tactic of reading a few stories consecutively between reading other books. So far so good.

BTW – I love the covers that Vintage designed from this Nabokov series. I love the use of what appear to be shadow boxes, though are likely specimen cases – as Nabokov studied butterflies…

See them all here.

Click on the thumbnails for enlargements. Too bad that they didn’t do a version for Lolita as well…

I’ve read both of Bolano’s larger works (Savage Detectives and 2666) and was immensely impressed by both. The Skating Rink is the first of Bolano’s shorter works of fiction that I’ve read, and I was pleased to find same mastery at work in it.

A Note on Translations:

I was initially concerned that Bolano translated by a different translator might make a significant difference. Savage Detectives and 2666 are both brilliantly translated by Natasha Wimmer. The shorter fiction coming out of New Directions Press are translated by Chris Andrews. I was happy to find that Andrew’s translation was as fluid as Wimmer’s.

I’m a little picky about translators… especially with authors I admire. A good example is Marguerite Duras. Richard Seaver and Barbara Bray are both excellent translators of Duras’ writing. In recent years I’ve read a number of Duras books by other translators, where Duras’ writing felt flat and disjointed. An entirely different experience – tho it has occurred to me to blame the author herself…

This is not the sort of book I would typically read – for starters, I have no interest in Mormons or polygamy… I picked this book up because I’d read somewhere that David Ebershoff had worked as an editor with David Mitchell and I figured that was as good a recommendation as any. I was fortunate that my fuzzy reasoning panned out – Ebershoff’s blending of contemporary and historical first person narratives (a little like DM) kept the book dynamic and interesting. I wondered at one point whether reading the two narratives separately would have been as interesting. Likely not – or not in the same way.

The Parker Series by Richard Stark

“I wouldn’t wait for him if he was my Siamese twin…”