Well, it’s been a while since I shared a bookshelf snapshot. For any newer readers, the idea here is that I’m trying not to keep books unless they’re meaningful to me or are things I’ll likely reread. Every once in a while, the books have a neat story. I’m slowly cataloguing them all, whether they have good stories or not. My shelves are organized roughly by color. Here we are in shelf cubby number 13 (of 20), transitioning from very dark covers to the more neutral tones.

Riding along the top there is a book I got for work and didn’t like very much. The author fancies himself a maverick but seemed to me to mostly just be kind of flakey and annoying.

My kids wore out the copy of The Hobbit we had had for years, so this is a newer copy. I read Bobbie Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns a long time ago in college and found it kind of so-so. Her In Country was much better, if with less of a carnival appeal to it.

Barth I have perpetual mixed feelings about. Giles Goat-Boy is hilarious and smart and never-ending and really uneven, like pretty much all of Barth’s long fiction that I’ve read. I’ll likely dip back into it someday.

I read the Baldwin essays and liked a couple of them but was less interested in the rest. I imagine I’ll give the ones I liked another read someday, so for now I’m hanging onto it. I recently read one of his novels and felt very meh about it.

Lethem is pretty consistently good, or at least aligned with my tastes. The Fortress of Solitude is one of my favorites of his.

The Southern literature anthology was the text of a class I took in college, and it’s chock full of good stuff, and of less good stuff. I revisit things in it from time to time and generally tend to hang onto anthologies. I’ll skip quickly to the next book, A Handbook to Literature, which is an earlier version of the copy that made an appearance in shelf #6. This copy happens to’ve been my mother’s. A professor of mine was the editor of the more recent edition that I used in college.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is magnificent and very much worth keeping to reread later.

I never finished Pierre, though I reckon I’ll read it one day. I also didn’t read A Whaler’s Dictionary all the way through. It’s more of a commonplace book than a thing you sit and read. It’s got some neat entries in it. I picked it up a few years ago when doing an in-depth read of Moby-Dick. It’s a nice book to own, and one that I’d be surprised to find in my local library.

I keep Pynchon, so V remains on the shelf. I haven’t read that one in many years and didn’t love it when I did read it. I can see myself trying it out again, though I’d be more interested, as I think about it just now, rereading one of his others.

I never finished The Savage Detectives. I’ve read Bolaño’s 2666 a couple of times and had been told that this one was also a really good book, but I lost interest maybe 2/3 of the way through and never got back into it. One day maybe I’ll try again. It’s that sort of negligent optimism that keeps me hanging onto this one.

Here’s another humdinger of a shelf. Riding along the top there, we’ve got yet another edition of Moby-Dick. I’ve never actually read this edition, but it was a gift and I don’t really feel great about selling or donating a gift. The last time I remember doing so, it was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and my sister-in-law, who had purchased it for me from my wish list, busted me. I really wanted to like Lowry’s book because people whose opinions I respected liked it, but it just didn’t do the trick for me, and I was in the middle of a purge of a couple of hundred books to make room for things I did value as literature (vs. as gifts). Anyway, I’m keeping this one.

Next up we have The Decameron and Don Quixote, which I read together a few years ago during a period of reading frame tales (stories within stories). The Decameron is full of bawdy jokes and is sometimes boring and sometimes hilarious to the extent that a book about aristocrats escaping the plague by leaving the city behind to go out into the country and tell one another moralistic and sometimes bawdy tales can be. Don Quixote is also really funny (if sometimes a bit tiresome) and is one I’ll likely reread in a decade or so.

I forget where I heard about Wickersham, but I picked this book up without really knowing what to expect. I didn’t love its first story, but on the whole, the stories wound up being really good, really well done. I kept the book as a reminder to read more Wickersham later.

This shelf holds two by Nicholson Baker — The Traveling Sprinkler and The Fermata. What an off-beat character the main guy (Paul Chowder) in these novels is. He’s kind of delightful and kind of an asshole. The books give us his childlike view mixed with I guess a bit of depravity (especially in the latter book). I liked Sprinkler in part because it taught me what a traveling sprinkler is as a real thing in the world (and what a neat thing, full of possibility for metaphor). I think there’s another in the series of Chowder books, but I forget whether I’ve read it if so. I’m sort of mesmerized by Baker’s easy-seeming style. I should probably get rid of these and read them, if ever again, from the library.

I’m a bit of a Pynchon junkie. When I read Bleeding Edge, I thought of it as the most accessible long-form Pynchon to date. This of course means that it’s not really full-on Pynchon, which is sort of disappointing but also sort of a relief. I keep Pynchon, so even though this one didn’t knock my socks off and I doubt I’ll ever read it again, on the shelf it remains.

I was talking to a friend just recently about Ozick. She’s somebody whose name I learned by reading interviews with David Foster Wallace, whose talking about the stuff he read or admired has informed a lot of what I’ve read over the past two decades. I’ve read five or six books by Ozick now, and they’re almost always really good. They don’t pack much of an emotional punch for me in general, but they’re just well written and so very smart, and I read her in part because I figure that reading smart stuff will make me smarter. To my friend, I likened Ozick to Alice Munro in terms of like the simple and matter of fact correctness of the way her stories are put together and narrated, but like Munro writing in a way more informed by academia than about the lives of Canadian women. I don’t remember a lot about The Cannibal Galaxy in particular, but in general I’m keeping and will plan to reread Ozick.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a brief biography of David Foster Wallace. I wrote a bit about it here. I keep it because I keep Wallace’s work and ephemera.

Finally, we have Richard Powers’s The Time of our Singing. I haven’t read this book in over a decade, but when I read it, I remember finding it really marvelous. This was at a time that I had been reading a fair bit of Powers and finding his work disappointing. He was regarded as sort of a wonder boy of literary fiction, but I thought his books were contrived and awkward, and it seemed often enough like he maybe hadn’t ever actually met or spoken with a real human being for long enough to be able to write one convincingly. This book was such a nice change. Looking back, it’s hard for me to say whether it was actually beautifully done or was just a relief after so much other bleh work I’d been reading by Powers (a stomped toe being a sort of relief after so many kicks in the nuts). In any case, it’s one I’d like to try again sometime.

In my next bookshelves post, we’ll transition from blacks and grays into beiges and whites, with of course a few of the usual suspects lined up.

Here we are starting the second half of the bookshelves series, and it’s a bit of a dud, or perhaps it’s fitting, as a few of these I’ve left only half-finished.

I like Mark Twain but haven’t read the one here. I think I got it at a library sale of old books many years ago. One day I’ll get around to it.

I put The Brothers Karamazov down about 700 pages into it maybe 20 years ago, and two or three years ago decided to see if I could read the whole thing with a critical eye. I could! I picked up this biography of Dostoevsky by a historian whose work on Dostoevsky David Foster Wallace (of course) wrote good things about. It was a very readable book, but I ran out of time to read both this tome and The Brothers Karamazov simultaneously and on a bit of a deadline, so I stopped 200 or 300 pages in. I like to think I’ll go back to it some day.

I had heard that Flaubert was the quintessential stylist, and so what better way to read this classic than en Français? That turns out to be difficult if you don’t really know much Français. I tried a few years anyway, with a translation app on my phone to help me quickly get a handle on vocabulary I was missing. It was tedious and frustrating, and maybe one day I’ll try again (in English if not in French), but here we are three books into the shelf and I’ve completed not a one of them.

The Whale I read a few years back along with a bunch of other secondary material when leading an online group read of Moby-Dick. This one is obviously mis-shelved down here among the black books. It was a nice read. I don’t know if I’ll go back to it, though, but I hang onto it just in case, since as soon as I get rid of it, I know something will compel me to read Moby-Dick again and I’ll regret the loss of this secondary source.

DeLillo I tend to keep, figuring I’ll do some big completist type survey of his work some day. I read Mao II a few years ago and was I think so-so on it.

The Swerve was neat — a rare bit of nonfiction that I picked up in part because when I saw the title, it made me think back fondly to my old college class on Milton (my professor introduced me then to the concept of swerve).

This edition of Heart of Darkness is illustrated by Matt Kish, who also illustrated the Moby-Dick we saw on the last shelf. It’s really lovely to look at, and it was fun to see some of the ways in which he departed in this book from some of the themes and gestures so prevalent in his Moby-Dick art (though some of those remain).

I forget what I thought of the Eggers book. Probably I thought it was Eggers-ish, which is to say maybe a little too cute and proud of itself but also with something worthwhile in it. I think I recall that a friend sent me this book (his own copy) and didn’t want it back, and it’s not super clear to me whether I’m to cherish it as a gift or send it out to someone else in the world to enjoy. I suspect the latter.

And finally, Look Homeward, Angel. I grew up in North Carolina, though not in the mountains that Wolfe writes of. Wolfe is celebrated at UNC, which I attended. I remember seeing in some museum or pamphlet about him while I was in school there a photo of him standing beside knee-high stacks of paper that made up, I believe, this book. I should love this book, but I’ve twice now started it without finishing it. I don’t remember that anything has particularly turned me off to it, but I’ve just petered out for one reason or another. On a trip for work recently, I watched the fairly recent movie Genius, which tells the story of Wolfe and his relationship with editor Max Perkins. I enjoyed the movie, though I can’t imagine why they picked Jude Law to play Wolfe, and it made me want to try the book again. Maybe the third time’ll be the charm.

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.