Well this is a sad little shelf compared to the others so far. Rather than being stuffed full or having a few tag-alongs stacked on top, we’ve got some leaners, and a couple of pretty dull ones in the mix too.

We start with more Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn is sort of a noir book that I enjoyed, though it’s not my favorite Lethem by a pretty long shot.

The Melville biography is actually quite good — a really nice mix of literary criticism and biography and a must-read if you have more than a passing interest in Melville or in Moby-Dick. It is very readable, and I’ll almost certainly at least re-skim it in the next decade or so.

I tried reading Catch-22 some 15 years ago and couldn’t get into it, but I tried again in the last five years and loved it. What a mix of hilarity and gut-punching.

Next up, we have the last Mitchell from before he went kind of rogue with the weird pseudo-sci-fi horology stuff. I recommended The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet to some coworkers a few years ago before remembering that it opens with a really grisly complicated birth scene complete with diagrams, which isn’t usually the sort of thing it would occur to me to recommend to coworkers. In any case, this really is a lovely book about the Dutch East India company opening a trade route to Japan, with a little bit of the mysticism that leads into the catastrophe that is Mitchell’s followup The Bone Clocks. Maybe we can consider the gap between this and the next book sort of a moment or space of silence or void in honor of the book Mitchell could’ve/should’ve written next.

I didn’t absolutely love every moment of Barnes’s History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, but there was surely some good stuff in evidence, and in general I’m hanging onto Barnes, as I believe he’s smart and important and is somebody I’ll want to keep reading and rereading.

Wallace of course was inevitable (something by, about, or somehow pertaining directly to him has been found — unintentionally, I assure you — on every compartment of the shelves so far), and this issue of Sonora Review focuses on his work. I keep it because I’m a near-completist.

I rarely read nonfiction. When I do, it tends to be about things like art forgery or the classical concept of swerve as a way of understanding the universe — basically stuff that teaches me about art or literature or culture — but a couple of years ago, I was forced asked to lead a team at my company, and as a result (since I was more of an “I’ll just get this done” person than an “I’ll help others get this done” person), I read a few books on leadership. I still do kind of pinch my nose and wade through a book of this sort every once in a while (I’m in one now called Thanks for the Feedback). This one in any case was pretty interesting. Although it read very much like a consultant-authored book, it read a lot less like an infomercially “I am just going to pontificate at you inspirationally” book than others because they backed it up with lots of data. The authors looked at a lot of teams that had been successful and tried to extract data about things that correlated with that success, and there was plenty in this book to highlight and think about. It’s a little dry, and I highlighted and took notes about all the good bits, so I suppose I’d recommend asking me for the highlights over reading the book, if you’re in the market for such stuff, but I’ve kept it because my company paid for it (so selling it back feels inappropriate) and because I could well imagine flipping back through it sometime.

The book on computer programming is dry and horrible, and my company bought it for me and I’m ashamed I haven’t read it. A developer I admire recommended it a few years ago, and I got to page 11. I hang onto it out of shame and should really pass it along to a developer on my team or elsewhere within the company.

The first Roth I read was Portnoy’s Complaint, and boy was it hilarious. There’s good stuff in Goodbye Columbus too, but it’s probably not worth keeping. I read one other book by Roth a year or two ago. I’m kind of meh on him. He seems pretty funny but kind of a shithead. I’m putting this book in the sell-back pile now, and I suppose I’ll really need to start stocking up on dark blue or purple books to round out this shelf.

I ran across Jodi Angel in the little magazine one story (which I really love, though I have a backlog of about two years to wade through), and this was a really solid collection. She writes often enough from the perspective of teenaged boys, and much better than I’ve ever managed to write even though I once was a teenaged boy and a fair few bits of the little writing I’ve tried to do over the last 20 years’ve been from the perspective of or about the experience of a teenaged boy. I’ll definitely revisit these, and other work by Angel.

We finish strong as we head into the browner tones with Ozick. Well, we finish strong in that we finish with Ozick, though this is very far from my favorite of the books of hers I’ve read. I think she’s great, but this was very meh for me. Still, when I find an author I really like, I tend to hang onto their books.

Next time we’ll get to a real humdinger. It’ll take me probably 3,000 words to get through writing about the Pynchon, Byron, Barth, some of the shorter works of Wallace (who will be nine for nine on my shelves), Delillo, Pinsky, the agrarian poets, and um the whole of of art history.