Well here we are at shelf number 9, nearly halfway through the series. This one is a pretty heavy duty one.

Riding along the top there we’ve got a famous essay collection by Wallace that contains a couple of my favorite essays (the cruise ship one that so well describes despair amidst the trappings of pleasure and the state fair one). Then we have a short story collection that is mostly kind of so-so but that does do a pretty good job of dramatizing how easy it is to try to appear to be a good person while actually being quite a bad person. It’s really honest, nasty stuff that struck a chord with me when I read it as a young man. Generally I don’t recommend Wallace’s short stories to people, and of his several story collections, this is the one I’m least likely to recommend stories from.

I didn’t love Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, but it was fine, and I’m keeping Barnes for probable further study later.

I love this collection of Byron’s work. I bought it cheap at a used book store back in college, when I aspired to one day own a big collection of old and rare books. I don’t suppose it’s too rare since I was able to afford it as a college student who sold his plasma for booze money, but it was published in 1905, which is old for my collection. The pages are pretty brittle, and I don’t often actually read it very often (did make it through a fair bit of Don Juan 20ish years ago), but it is one of the books I really just like owning as an object.

I first tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow probably about 15 years ago. I don’t think I got past about page 2. It just didn’t grab me. I false started a few other times, once even getting about halfway through before giving up. Finally, a few years ago I led an online group read of Gravity’s Rainbow that forced me to get through the book. Or maybe I had managed to read it once already by then and this was a reread. I don’t remember. At any rate, I’ve now read it I believe three times fully, and though it is in many ways a really awful, ugly book, it’s also a real work of genius that runs the gamut from inducing a gag reflex to making you laugh aloud to making you roll your eyes to making you feel real sympathy for some of the characters. I figure I’ll read it once a decade or so from here on out.

I didn’t love Chimera, but that’s my way with Barth, whose books I keep even if I don’t love them.

A person who contributed to one or two of my online group reads wrote Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky, and I tend to keep books by people I know or sort-of know. Coincidentally, that author happens apparently and independently to be friends with a college friend of mine who recently died and who has a memoir about the last year or so of her life coming out soon. I’ll keep that one too.

We saw Peter Heller back on the blue shelves. His The Painter is really good, and I’ll keep reading his books until he pulls a Mitchell on me and starts writing stinkers.

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall I read as part of the Tournament of Books a couple of years ago. It ticked a number of my boxes and seemed like a pretty solid first effort, so this is one of those books I kept maybe to read again some day but mostly as a reminder to revisit this author when he publishes more.

I didn’t much like Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, though I feel guilty for not liking it, as it’s supposed to be foundational. I’d like to give it another try one day, though, as sometimes it’s just not the right time for a book. Well, this is probably a very right time in the world for this sort of book but it wasn’t the right time for me.

Robert Pinsky came to my college when I was a junior studying poetry writing. He was really great — gracious with his time, earnest when he spoke, personable (at a dinner I was lucky enough to get to go to, I landed a seat at his table, and he talked warmly about his grandkids and was generally charming and full of stories), and really just all-around inspiring. He was then the poet laureate of the U.S. if I’m not mistaken (or maybe he came to that a little later, or a little earlier — I forget), and he had a thing for reading poems aloud. So I developed a thing for reading poems aloud, and for example one evening I sat in my dorm room and read his translation of Dante’s Inferno aloud to myself (sipping liberally from a big tall cup of vodka and Mt. Dew, if I’m being entirely honest). I also printed out copies of a bunch of poems that I thought merited reading aloud and carried them around with me. Pinsky gave a really great public reading at the university, and I very vividly recall his reading of the poem “Impossible to Tell,” which is a really great poem. Otherwise, at the time, I didn’t have a great deal of affection for his poems, but I sure liked the man, and his voice, and his presence, and his influence over my approach to poetry as a thing best done aloud. This (then) new and selected poems of his, titled The Figured Wheel, is inscribed to me (something vague and not actually all that impressive or personalized like “Good luck with poetry”) and so is a thing I value given how I valued my little distant interactions with him. It’s been I guess about 20 years now since I tried reading it, so I should probably give it another shot with the benefit of a little more age (though also with a much reduced interest in and patience for poetry). The program that brought Pinsky to our school was one that offered senior honors students more access to the visiting poets. Only a handful of juniors were allowed to go to a workshop and later a dinner in his honor, and I didn’t win the drawing or lottery or whatever, which was a little devastating. My professor (who fills about half of shelf #20) came to me at some point saying he wasn’t going to be able to go himself and giving me his slot, which was, I suspect, basically an act of charity on his part, for which I was and remain most grateful.

The Southern Critics is a little book of criticism and history I believe about the agrarian poets of the early and mid-20th century. My sister-in-law gave it to me years ago, and I’m sure I read it then. I haven’t read it since, but I may one day, and I hang onto this partially as a little souvenir of a burgeoning shared interest in literature that that sister-in-law and I have since continued. In other words, I feel a hair sentimental about it, to the extent that I do sentimental.

There’s plenty of Delillo’s work that I don’t love, and there’s probably a solid 400 pages of Underworld that I could do without, but there’s also a lot in this behemoth that does the trick for me, including some fun stuff about outsider art and one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read in a long intro describing a day at the baseball field. I’ll probably read this again in the next 20 years. It’s another that I false started a time or two before actually finishing it.

Finally, in an inversion of the “books shoved in on top of others” pattern, I’ve got a huge art book tipped sideways on the bottom. I read maybe 20% of it a few years ago after picking it up cheap I forget where, but I’ve forgotten most of what I read. I like art (what a stupid, broad statement) but don’t know much formally about it, so having a book like this that I can go to every once in a while to fill in a knowledge gap is helpful, if sort of infrequent given what a pain it is to get the book out and return it to the stack.

So, on the whole, a really solid shelf with yet more foundational stuff on it. It’s a doozie, and #10 will be too, so stay tuned.

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.

I have to start this post off with a confession: I used to write poetry. When I was 16 or 17, I wrote about things like “oh, I have these deep soulful blue eyes that speak of my pain in this world,” but by the time I got to college (at least the later parts of it, during which I wrote a poetry manuscript that’s bound in one of the university libraries and for part of which I actually somehow won a literary prize with a cash reward for which the value was equivalent to like 8 weeks of selling my plasma, which I think is probably pretty close to a Pulitzer or a Nobel), I was a little more serious and let’s say literary about it. By this, I mean that I read a lot of conventional poetry and adopted an attitude of “fuck that shit” and tried to buck tradition in mostly ultimately pretty silly ways, but in ways that seemed to either spark the admiration of my peers or cause them to lie to me. I did also write a big long formal and mostly traditional cycle of poems that included a couple sonnets and a villanelle and if I’m not misremembering a few forms of my own devising in it, so I wasn’t all “fuck that shit” but was also a little bit “but there’s sometimes something kind of nice about that shit.”

This all brings us to good old Richard Wilbur, whom I do not like. Some of his poems are nice. His children’s poems are downright delightful. I met him while I was studying poetry writing in college and indeed had an opportunity to have him critique one of my poems, which from my perspective (not so far removed, I’ll grant, from the “deep soulful blue eyes” perspective, but also a fair bit more mature) was a like elegy to the loss of religious feeling in spite of deep family ties to that feeling. When Wilbur visited my school and spoke in his sort of elevated tone about poetry, it was sort of wonderful, but when he read and critiqued my poem, one of many (almost certainly more artful ones by my peers) that he could have selected, in front of a big bunch of people, and when his critique consisted of basically the statement that the author probably needed to get right with God, I was pretty unimpressed. Still, if he is still living, he is considered one of our best living poets, and in spite of my kind of terrible experience with his semi-publicly dismissing whatever like literary or prosodic value one of my poems may have gestured toward, it was neat to meet him. He gave a reading while he visited my school (during which he really did endearingly read some of the children’s poems), and afterward I had a chance to sit around and drink whiskey with him and some classmates and teachers, and it was very neat (he told stories from the war, among others).

All of which in the end is to say that this nearly 20-year-old collection of Wilbur’s poems is autographed but thankfully and somewhat surprisingly not autographed “may you find Jesus, you troglodyte.” I don’t love his poems for grown-ups, but I do admire something about his formalism. When my class of poets had a chance to spend some time with him, and somebody asked whether he labored over his poems, he said that they just kind of came to him (in I suppose rhyming iambic meter), to which I mostly call bullshit. So that’s Wilbur.

Ahem.

The Dog Stars is lovely and sad. I certainly recommend it, and I’ll also recommend Heller’s The Painter, which I must surely have kept (though upon a quick scan, I don’t see it on my shelves, so maybe I gave it to someone).

Now we come to the sweet little darlings of my collection. Back in college, I harbored dreams of one day owning a bookstore, not understanding that that was no way to make a real living. This was before the kindle was a thing, even, so it wasn’t as dire a prospect as it is now. Every once in a while, I’d pick up an old-timey book or two. I used to have a set of three volumes of Ben Jonson from I believe the 1700s, but they were in bad shape, and I eventually gave them the old heave-ho. I have an oldish Byron (shelf #9)  that we’ll get to a few shelves hence. But these two little books are so nice. Longfellow is so nice. I read Hiawatha many years ago in a different edition, and I forget whether I read Evangeline in these books or in another, but this little set from 1872 really pleases me, and there is much to admire within Longfellow’s work. I suppose he too, had my heathenish sentiments been put before him, may have proposed that I find my way to Jesus, but he didn’t say it to my face in front of my peers, so I can hardly fault him for it.

More Saunders, another set of essays on Wallace, and more Barth. Blah blah blah, the usual. Let me pause here, though. There’s also a reader’s guide to Gravity’s Rainbow that is indispensable if you’re a serious reader of the book. A few years ago, I submitted some ideas (pertaining, oddly enough, to lemmings and NYC independent theater of the ’60s) to its author that he seemed intrigued by and said he’d follow up on, but I’ve never heard back, so maybe my ideas didn’t hold water. I keep meaning to check out the since-revised edition to see if I (or my weird reference) make a cameo.

And then we come to Girl with Curious Hair by Wallace. I love “Lyndon” and “John Billy” from this collection, though “My Appearance” is probably more well known given legal shenanigans pertaining to it. The novella that wraps up the collection was reportedly stolen from the trunk of Wallace’s car and thus rewritten from scratch, but I’ve never known whether or not to believe that story, since “John Billy” seems to be influenced heavily by Gass’s “Omensetter’s Luck”  (see shelf #4), whose preface also goes at length to say that the original manuscript was stolen (which seems kind of too coincidental).

You can’t really see it in the photo, but there’s another graphic novel of Moby-Dick tucked in there. My ten-year-old son recently took a look at this and liked it, so I’m optimistic that I may get him looped into Melville-mania, though my wife and daughter continue to resist. I quoted a bit at the dinner table a couple of nights ago, and nobody swooned at how good it was, so count me a pessimist for the moment (maybe I should’ve chosen a quote other than “ego non baptizo te in nomine patris sed in nomine diaboli”?).

Often enough, while on a video conference for work, I’ll hear what sounds like an English usage error, or something will trigger me to think about usage, and I’ll turn around and pluck Garner’s Modern American Usage off the shelf to check on something. I had cause to do this just yesterday. We saw the smaller cousin of this book (also by Garner) on shelf #1. This is one of my favorite, most useful, books. I’m pretty decent at using words, but pretty much any time there’s ambiguity around usage, I can pick this book up and get clarity. Garner is very witty, and I really love his language change index, which offers different ways of thinking about usage issues, such as for example (my favorite among several) the etiquette analogy, which rates usage errors on a scale from “audible farting” to “audible belching” to “overloud talking” to “elbows on table” to “refined.” If you’re interested in American English usage, pick this one up. Since Wallace is a theme in my shelves, it’s worth noting that he and Garner seem to have been fans of one another, which is in fact why Garner’s books are on my radar at all.

Finally here we have Borges, who in this translation I do not love. A Wallace (of course) acquaintance and semi-biographer has suggested to me that another translation is much better, but my feeling from reading this collection, admittedly kind of tired, on an airplane a few years ago, was that Borges does this thing where he states something really obvious as if it’s something of consequence, and that it doesn’t work. It’s almost like the old Jon Lovitz thespian skit on SNL in which he does transparently poor acting and then pronounces with a flourish “Acting!” So, I’ll probably reread this collection one day, or some subset of the stories translated by someone else, but there is certainly no rush.

This is a pretty important shelf to me, even if I don’t love every author or every book on it. Next we’ll wrap up blue and head into purple, with, naturally a few of the usual suspects represented.

Well here we are at shelf section number six. We’re almost a third of the way through the series, and here we move very firmly into the blues. More Barth skating along the top there, though I forget why it’s misshelved, as it’s been a few years since I read this one. It’s fine — mercifully short for Barth, and entertaining enough. I keep it because I keep Barth, figuring that one day I’ll learn how to learn something from him. Beneath that a book on literary theory that I believe I got as a freebie at the MLA conference a few years ago. I haven’t really read much theory and certainly not much in nearly two decades, so I like to think I’ll crack this one sometime to broaden my mind, though really I’m finding that I become a less careful and thoughtful reader over time, so maybe I won’t.

Steinbeck’s East of Eden was for a while my top few favorite books. I read it along with a bunch of other Steinbeck oh maybe 12 or 14 years ago but haven’t revisited his work in a while. I’m sure I will. The Song of Hartgrove Hall surprised me. I picked it up last year during my year of browsing shelves more or less at random and looking for paperbacks by people who were not straight white men. Honestly, once I dug into it, I thought it’d be a sleepy, dreary, fusty old death-of-the-landed-gentry’s-legacy sort of thing, and I suppose it basically was, especially for the first hundred pages or so, but there was also a lot of really beautiful writing in the book and I wound up liking it a lot more than I expected (enough that I kept it, at least).

I read All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 as a selection from the Tournament of Books, which I led kind of a thing for among some of my coworkers. I loved it. His pacing is a little too fast, but gosh did he write a nice book, and I can easily see myself going back to this one some day.

I’ve already documented the appeal Lethem’s work holds for me (am currently reading a short story collection of his that I’m liking quite a lot). Chronic City isn’t my favorite of his books by a long shot, but it’s good enough, and it makes a reference to Infinite Jest in the form of a fat brick of an imaginary book called Obstinate Dust, and that amuses me.

The book about Cape Fear is one my dad gave me a while back that I believe must have belonged to my grandmother. I forget the precise significance of the book, but the Cape Fear river (yes, that one) runs through Wilmington, NC, where my parents grew up, and so this is a book out of my past. I believe there may be an anecdote in the book about my grandfather or some other member of my dad’s family being something of a reknowned dancer in the area, but I’m not positive. This isn’t the sort of book I usually go in for, but I like to think I’ll read it one day, when trying to figure out a bit more about where I come from.

I think I’m not cut out for Beckett. I tried this trio of short novels a few years ago and found it nearly impossible to wade through and gave up. I had the same reaction to Ulysses on my first few tries, and the same with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I’ve now read with increasing pleasure a few times. I’ll try this one again in a decade or so and see if I’m fit for it then.

An anonymous coworker sent me The Art of Fielding probably just about 5 years ago, knowing that I had a thing for Moby-Dick, which, paired with baseball, is featured prominently in this book. It’s not the absolute best book I ever read, but I enjoyed it quite a lot, and I have a soft spot for anonymous gifted books, I suppose. It also serves as a reminder to keep Harbach on my radar.

Handy Dad was a Father’s Day gift years ago, and because I’m not handy and I’m a little lazy when it comes to actually getting up and doing things, I’ve done very few of the things in it with my kids. I mean, making a soap box car or erecting a tree house sounds really nifty, but it also sounds like work. I have mustered the gumption to make a number of paper airplanes using a pattern in the book, and I can report that they are pretty much the best designed paper airplanes I’ve ever seen. (I’m both un-handy and lazy about activities, but to my credit, I’ve sat down and read books at length to my kids nearly every day of their lives and often enough for a couple of hours in a single day, so I am at most a partial deadbeat.)

Wallace comes up yet again in Elegant Complexity, a really great reader’s guide to Infinite Jest. It does a nice job giving both chronology and discussion of themes within the book, and even though I had read and discussed the novel a few times before getting this book, I found it illuminating and will certainly go back to it when I reread and reread IJ in the future.

Finally, another guide in the Harmon and Holman handbook to literature. This book catalogues literary terms, periods, schools of thought, and so on. It was a required text book when I took a college class on Modern poetry by one William ahem Harmon. As in Harmon whose name is on the spine of the book. It was a good class but a weird one, in which he talked at us about poetry but also made us learn terms from the book that honestly probably weren’t that important to learn (though I do like that I can still tell you about asyndeton and hypotaxia). Harmon was the weirdest professor I ever had, and I loved his class. I wrote a paper once on Hopkins and Yeats and bird poems whose title was a strange sort of pseudo-mathematical equation, and he took it in stride. He once held forth about a competition to find the longest one-syllable word in English, with his (maybe?) winning entry of “broughammed,” and I don’t think he ever replied to the email I sent him in which I proposed a longer (if dubious and basically fabricated, in an “if you take X to mean Y and grant that Z, then this is a legitimate word” way) word, subject to lots of interpretation and perhaps a conveniently fanciful pronunciation — “schoenanthed” (I mean, if we can imagine that the broughammed-tying word “squirrelled” is one syllable, I’ll take “schoenanthed” as a given too). All of which is to say that he was my type of weird. Later, I learned that my mother in college had the Thrall, Hibbard and Holman Handbook to Literature, which if you’re reading carefully you’ll note shares an editor with Harmon’s book. So as with The Inlking way back on shelf #2, there’s sort of a neat if random and actually not remotely significant link between my mother’s college experience and mine. We’ll see her older edition of the handbook if we get as far as shelf #13. I still use Harmon’s edition as a reference every once in a while. Where else am I ever likely to learn that “ficelle” is the name of a string used to control a marionette and that Henry James used the term to mean “confidante” — a means (in the handbook’s words and not the words of this blog’s humble author) “by which a self-effacing author conveys necessary information.”

More blue next time, with a lot of the usual suspects and two of my favorite little books I hang onto as objects, even if I don’t open them very often at all.