2023: reading diary

“novels”

My normiest predilection, at the moment, is my unabashed love for NYRB Classics. I believe it’s the most vital English-language publishing venture of my lifetime — where it might’ve been stuffy or institutional, it’s a deeply humane project. The artwork is striking, the paperback design is cozy, and their distribution arm ensures the books are widely available. Were I to read their science, philosophy, and history offerings, it’d be a better education than any I’ve received in a classroom.

The catalog is curated with a crusader’s verve: they’re out to prove significant texts were denied their place in the canon. They’re righting historical injustice, the vagaries of publishing through the ages. As a consumer, this sort of agenda makes me slightly wary. I’ve never cared, for instance, that Young Thug was “influential,” because I’ve never been convinced he’s any good. The former should follow the latter; regardless, that’s not why I read. Influence is a function of marketing, and if a work hasn’t aged well, it’s rarely the artist’s fault.

I like books that are ambitious and messy, or subtle and clever. I like tracking down some long out-of-print Pulitzer finalist to see what its whole deal is. Reading is a solitary activity — I’d rather explore than participate in a discourse. I didn’t publish any literary criticism this year, so all of my reading was for pleasure. I try to match novels with seasons and settings, then inevitably get bogged down and next thing you’re reading Thomas McGuane in November. In March Jia Tolentino asked readers to recommend an earth-shattering, perspective-shifting, fuck-me-up book to read over a weekend. I’m always chasing that high, and increasingly need to be drawn outside my comfort zone.

Over the summer, my friend Max was visiting New York and asked me where to go book shopping. I had no idea! I’ve never been inside the Strand, which I understand to be a Barnes & Noble-ass operation lousy with labor violations. I borrow from NYPL, visit bookstores when traveling, and go ham at library sales. I was thrilled to stumble into De Stiil in Montreal last year: needless to say, such a vibrant business could never survive Adams’s New York. In August I did damage at Binnacle Books in Beacon and Half Moon Books in Kingston. Ringing up my stack of Vintage Contemporaries, the proprietor of Rhino Records on North Front Street complimented my “exquisite taste.” Tell it to my editors, king!

I’m drawn to Bruised Apple Books in Peekskill at least once a year. I get up on the creaky ladders, scour blurbs, read summaries, and peruse jacket photos. I learn which bestsellers and award-winners from 1982 have been lost to the canon. I enter a time-warp of Reagan-era trade fiction dominated by tri-state B-listers: Gates, Exley, Barbash, the Bausch twins. Protégés of Gary Fisketjon, Gordon Lish, and Gerry Howard; an entire shelf of Anita Brookner. Twelve copies of The Hours. British and Irish story collections, middle-aged protagonists feeling the weather. The R shelf flooded with Roth and Russo (the two genders). It’s so modest and glamorous, it makes you want to quit your job and write a 230-page novel with a narrator named Suzanne.

I’ve often speculated as to where their stock comes from. Local colleges? William Kennedy himself? Was the median American so well- and broadly-read? Did every suburban housewife read Ann Beattie in 1989? In any event, I can’t imagine Hudson Valley shops will be brimming with dog-eared Moshfegh hardbacks thirty years from now. Here’s the tally:

• Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976)

  borrowed from Chatham Square Branch, New York
  Considered in Microreviews 11/7.

• Dima Alzayat’s Alligator and Other Stories (2020)
  advance reader copy from the publisher

• Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1987)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch, New York

• Richard Bausch’s The Last Good Time (1984)
  purchased at Bruised Apple Books, Peekskill, NY

• Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot (2020)
  purchased at Blackstone Library sale, Branford, CT

• Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City (1973)
  purchased at De Stiil, Montreal
  Newly translated and reissued in a gorgeous matte paperback, Last Summer in the City depicts putatively working-class Italians who occupy huge, sumptuous apartments. They barely work, drink like fishes, fuck like rabbits, and go to the beach every weekend. Nevertheless, they are — to a man — scornfully, suicidally depressed, because their fathers came home sad from the war or something. Might’ve been a nice warm-weather romp if not for its all-encompassing self-pity; experiences like this always make me wary of postwar novels in translation.

• Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998)
  purchased at Blackstone Library sale
  I’d been meaning to read this forever because it’s one of those books that turns up on lists of The Best New York Novels, and every used bookstore has multiple copies. Didn’t know it was full-on Virginia Woolf fanfic. Anyway it’s lovely.

• Sasha Fletcher’s Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World (2022)
  Christmas gift from my s/o

• Mary Gaitskill’s The Devil’s Treasure (2021)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch

• Mary Gaitskill’s This Is Pleasure (2019)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch
  I was hoping to write an essay pegged to Gaitskill’s weird Substack, but Hannah Gold beat me to it. The Devil’s Pleasure is an often brilliant reflection on life and writing; This Is Pleasure is reactionary tripe and you can’t tell me otherwise.

• Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour (2021)

  borrowed from Chatham Square Branch
  Considered in Microreviews 11/7.

• Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms (2021)

  advance reader copy from the publisher
  ”What else did anyone with comfortable enough means ever really do, except look at the news and accept the circumstances of the world so long as they did not interfere with the general course of what it took to live a life?”

• John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano (1944)
  purchased at Bruised Apple Books

• Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2020)
  Christmas gift from my s/o

• Fran Lebowitz’s The Fran Lebowitz Reader (1994)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch
  Knew virtually nothing about this person; intended to read this as background for a Gawker essay and didn’t get around to it until months later. Daisy Alioto’s opinion is the correct one.

• Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty (1990)
  downloaded from the New York Public Library
  Discussed in TR Book Club.

• Sam Lipsyte’s No One Left to Come Looking for You (2022)
  Christmas gift from my father

• Kayla Maiuri’s Mother in the Dark (2022)
  advance reader copy from the publisher

• Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein (2022)
  advance reader copy from the publisher

• Drew Millard’s How Golf Can Save Your Life (2023)

  advance reader copy from the publisher

  Discussed in TR Pen Pals.

• Joanna Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age (2009)
  purchased at Blackstone Library sale

  Indulgent, frivolous, my favorite thing I read this year. To write a long, pointless novel is audacious so long as the author knows it’s pointless (check) and the writing’s good (check). That’s why people read, like, William Gaddis, right? I’m a sucker for Obama-era ensemble novels about moony twenty-something New Yorkers; having read pretty much all of them, this is the holy grail. It’s also the most clear-eyed of the 9/11 Novels, in that it considers 9/11 something that mostly happened to other people.

• Gwendoline Riley’s First Love (2017)
  purchased at De Stiil

• Lucy Sante’s Low Life (1991)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch

• Lucy Sante’s Maybe the People Would Be the Times (2020)
  purchased at Unnameable Books, Brooklyn
  When I first read Sante, sometime in my mid-twenties, I remember being mad I hadn’t read her stuff earlier. I don’t mean this as a dig, although I suppose it is: her work would’ve really resonated with my 18-year-old self, and perhaps I’d have encountered New York in a more gracious way. I think every New Yorker should read her, to better understand the allure and what we as a generation are emulating; on the other hand, I can only feel taunted by her romantic accounts of bygone rental markets. These books are best digested as reference material — the breadth of her knowledge is stunning — and next year I’m hoping to track down her 1998 memoir.

• Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird (1976)
  borrowed from Seward Park Branch

  I adored All the Little Live Things in college; it’s still my favorite Stegner book. In the years since I’d somehow read all his novels except its direct sequel, The Spectator Bird. Suffice to say, I did not think this was going to be an Incest Novel. The Penguin Classics edition has a whole foreword about how Stegner considered it his magnum opus. I dunno man!

• Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917)

  borrowed from Chatham Square Branch