The Tunnel is a enough of a kick in the nuts that I had to put it first in the list so that I could have the rest of this shelf to recover. What a horrible negative ghastly vitriolic book. I don’t even remember how it ended. I had to give it a couple of tries before I could make myself slog through it. But there is this one blessed section about the dustbowl and a grasshopper plague that is one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read. I’ll keep the book for that alone. Also there’s one page upon which the words are arranged to look like a cock and balls (take that, George Herbert), which makes me giggle. There’s other good stuff too.

Stacked up sideways on top, we have Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which I enjoyed a lot. I think Tartt is maybe a rare talent, so I’ll keep reading her and keeping her work. The Makkai book I was ambivalent about. This is one I’m keeping so that I can remember to check out her later work.

Speaking of ambivalence, let’s look at Danielewsky’s House of Leaves. It’s a difficult book and a frustrating book in much the same way that Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is frustrating, in that some of it is kind of terrible. I’m a sucker for literary gimmicks, but I tend to prefer mind-fucks to like weird typographical tricks. Still, there’s something kind of neat about some of the stuff this book does. I predict that I’ll try it again in a decade or so and will scoff at it and never think about it again.

John Milton? Who’s that guy? This book set me back $80 about 20 years ago, and a lot of it is dull as ditchwater. But one of my best professors in college was my Milton professor. He did this thing where he would just sort of hover outside the classroom until it was time for class to begin and then he would sort of run into the room and start talking at the same time and it’d be 50 minutes of ramming smart shit into my head. I admired the heck out of this guy, and I think I did some decent work in his class. I liked Milton’s Comus and Renaissance drama in general enough that I intended to study the stuff of this period as my life’s work, but it didn’t work out. I’ve thought a lot lately about maybe rereading at least Aereopagitica, though probably I’m too addled with age and 21st-century mind-numbing work experience to get much out of it. Anyway, this book, and that class, were formative for me. I learned in college that I’m a terrible reader with a terrible memory, so I had to reread things two or three times to make them stick, so I probably managed to read Paradise Lost 4 or 5 times in a semester. I guess a side benefit is that 20 years later, I can still recite the first 15 or 20 lines of Paradise Lost from memory. That’s practical.

Suttree is a really difficult book. I remember having to read the first 5 or 10 pages several times to get much out of them. The word that has always come to mind when reading this book is “lush.” McCarthy has such a great vocabulary, whether he’s writing about pampooties or the chaparral or good old humble Knoxville, as in this book. I like McCarthy generally, and this one I keep because it’s about the place (albeit a different place than the one I really know) I’ve called home for nearly two decades now. A few years ago, a bar opened in town named Suttree’s, and I went there a fair bit until the night I discovered that it had been discovered (there was a line down the street), which didn’t fit my mostly reclusive temperament.

The next two slim volumes are one about Wallace and one by Gaddis. I read the Wallace book long ago but don’t remember anything about it; Burn is considered a scholar. Gaddis’s Agape Agape I don’t remember much about, but Gaddis is Gaddis, and I suspect this one’ll mean a lot more to me as I get older and older, as it is (if I recall correctly) sort of a dying yawp of a book based largely on Gaddis’s ruminations on the player piano as sort of a weird avatar of the crisis of easily reproducible or mechanized art and, in its obsolescence, probably of death.

Speaking of kicks in the nuts, there aren’t many people I don’t know (other than, say, Trump and company) who’d I’d line up to cock my big hammy leg back and sock really hard in the nuts, but Franzen is one of them. I don’t think he’s a particularly good writer, but he’s lauded as one of our greats. He writes in this contemporary realist mode, but his realism is terrible. He’s humorless (or when he tries to be humorous, it generally fails to land), and I’m not sure he really understands what it’s like to be a hu-man being. He and Wallace were sort of competitive friends, and it’s hard for me to imagine, based on what I’ve read of Franzen’s fiction and his of his public persona, that Wallace could have derived much value from the friendship or the competition. I thought Freedom was really awful and haven’t managed to make myself read Purity yet. The Corrections wasn’t terrible; there was some ok stuff in it. Still, I can’t muster much more than casual disdain for Franzen. A few years ago, there was a news item about a guy who stole Franzen’s glasses briefly (I believe they were later returned). I feel like Franzen probably deserved it and probably also deserved the kick in the nuts the opthalmological purnoiner failed (short-sightedly?) to deliver. I reckon I’ll read this goddamn book again one day in any case. There’s something not awful about it amid its awfulness.

If you’ve read many of my posts bout the nine shelves preceding this one, I’m sorry, and I also know that you know that I’ve got a thing for Moby-Dick. I tried to read it to my firstborn while she was in utero, but my wife ridiculed me just a few pages in (to her credit, it is awfully weird to read a book to a belly, and it is perhaps all the weirder to read to a belly a book such as this). So, it’s an important book to me. I’ve written about it (more about art about the book) on this blog here, and a lot more (with others) about the book itself here as part of an online group read I led a few years ago. This book is a really beautiful book containing an illustration per page from the artist’s edition of the book. When I was conducting the group read a few years ago, I found the art book (inspired by Zak Smith’s similar project around Gravity’s Rainboow — see shelf #2) and reached out to artist Matt Kish, who was very kind to respond and write some posts for my site. We’ve been in touch off and on since, and I have a tattoo based on one of his drawings, and he did me an unnecessary but nice courtesy by mentioning me in the acknowledgments of this beautiful collection of his drawings. So I guess I’ll keep it. I see his art every day in seven framed pieces of his original artwork that adorn my office walls, and I have a few bookmarks (I collect these) that my wife commissioned from him that I’m afraid to use for fear of messing them up (though I use them anyway — carefully).

Finally, we have The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. My son picked this out from somewhere (I forget where), and we shortly thereafter discovered that it had some pretty explicit T&A stuff in it that we weren’t quite ready for our then-8-year-old son to be exposed to. I mean what, Moore, not super appropriate for children?

Thus ends row two of the shelves. I fear that shelf #11 will be a disappointment by comparison, but there are plenty of good books yet to come.