Stuff I've Been Reading August 2021

I am about two weeks late with this, but here is my reading list for August. I will note that I read a lot more books than I bought.

Books Read August 2021

The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Birmingham. (Kindle). 2 August.

A book that gives a full picture of how Joyce wrote the book and how it was published. You will learn more than you ever wanted to know about Joyce's health issues, his sexual promiscuity, and his marriage if you read this book. Plus, as expected, there is a lot about how the book was published, distributed, and fought about in court.

The Odd Couple (play) by Neil Simon. (library hardcover and overdrive audiobook). 108 pgs. 540 running pgs. 3 August.

Barefoot in the Park (play) by Neil Simon. (library hardcover and overdrive audiobook). 114 pgs. 654 running pgs. 5 August.

Plaza Suite (play) by Neil Simon. (library hardcover and overdrive audiobook). 106 pgs. 1390 running pgs. 12 August.

As far as I am concerned, Neil Simon was one the great playwrights of the post World War II era in the United States. And these plays are a lot of fun to read/listen to/watch. 

Everyman by Philip Roth. (library hardcover). 182 pgs. 836 running pgs. 7 August.

One of those books best read after age forty. I liked it, but beware that Roth's short late books focus a lot on mortality and ageing.

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. (kindle). 240 pgs. 1076 running pgs. 8 August.

I had never heard of Suzuki before I saw an article about her on lithub. That article starts:

Here is what we know.

She was born in Japan in 1949. After graduating high school, she moved to Tokyo, where she worked as a bar hostess. She appeared in a few “pink films”—an arty subgenre of sexploitation cinema—directed by Kōji Wakamatsu, among others, and posed for the erotic art photographer Nobuyoshi Araki before devoting herself to writing full time. In 1973, she married the free jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, with whom she had a daughter; Abe died of a drug overdose in 1978, one year after their divorce. She was extremely productive in the years after his death, writing short stories, novels, and essays. She took her own life in 1986 at the age of 36.

This is, by and large, the sum total of biographical information readily available to English-language readers on the subject of Izumi Suzuki, a pioneering writer of science fiction whose first collection of stories to appear in English, Terminal Boredom, is available now from Verso. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is much more information available in English about the male artists with whom she lived and worked; her own life tends to be talked about in relation to theirs, when it is talked about at all. With the publication of Terminal Boredom, English-language readers will be able to discover Suzuki in her own right. So who was she, anyway, and what of the work she left behind?

Read the rest of Andrew Ridker''s article to get the details.

As far as the book, Terminal Boredom, it is a collection of stories written in Japanese and translated into English. Here is what the publisher says about the stories on goodreads:

 

The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.

In a future where men are contained in ghettoized isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia – until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted.

The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate 20th century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviors lies an atavistic appetite for destruction.

Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottle and baggies too hard.

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

 

Temporary by Hilary Leichter. (kindle). 208 pgs. 1284 running pgs. 9 August.

A short novel about work. Recommended if you like experimental novels. I, personally, think this one deserves more readers.

Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. (kindle). 304 pgs. 1694 running pgs. 12 August.

I read this book, originally, back in early 2010, I believe, and I was curious to read it again. It is the story of a man who can read minds, and who is starting to lose his power. (A metaphor for something, to be sure.) That man now spends his days researching and writing papers for Columbia Undergraduates, who pay him to do so. The book, published in 1972, also, seems to be a lamentation of the idea that the sixties are over.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth. (library hardcover). 292 pgs. 1986 running pgs. 16 August. 

Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman makes his final appearance.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election by Michael Bender. (overdrive audiobook). 432 pgs. 2418 running pgs. 17 August.

Being something of a news junkie, I am not sure that I learned a lot of new things reading this book. I agree with Dave Weigel of the post who wishes we could transport 40 years into the future and get a Rick Perlstein type treatment of the Trump years.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya. (kindle). 224 pgs. 2642 running pgs. 19 August.

This book sat on my wish list for a couple of years after I saw it recommended on lithub both for the writing and the cover. Here is the plug about the book

The twelve hilarious fables in Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder look at everyday life so closely they turn it inside out. Shopping for clothes becomes a menacing interaction with a possible monster; a marriage evolves into an oiled up performance of masculinity. In my favorite, a bus-stop interaction during a typhoon leads to riding across the sky, clinging to an umbrella. Like Kelly Link and Karen Russell, the writers in America she most resembles, there’s an almost magician-like quality to what Motoya does: there’s no sleight of hand. It happens right in front of you. Yet the way she tilts reality always interrogates something bigger, like the meaning of masculinity in a marriage. This is thrilling work, and alongside Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata, it seems clear there’s a movement of sorts coming from Japan.

–John Freeman, Lit Hub executive editor

And here is what Emily Temple said about the cover, again, at LitHub:

Talk about color: these are compelling without being exactly appealing, and same goes for the bubble forms themselves, which look real enough to touch. Plus, I’m always a sucker for a cover design in which the text and image interact, so I appreciate the way the simple title and author lines press against the bubbles behind them.

Temple has a regular feature on book covers.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. (kindle). 337 pgs. 2979 running pgs. 25 August.

 

I bought this book in June of 2010 but only recently realized that I owned it and could read it after the book came up on the New Yorker fiction podcast. In that podcast, Susan Choi read and discussed Found Objects, the first chapter of the book.  Egan's book was discussed in the literary press when it was published for its experimental Power Point chapter.  Here is an article by Merve Emre about gimmicks in fiction in a recent New Yorker that mentions the book:

When Jennifer Egan’s novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, much fuss was made over its penultimate chapter, which presents the diary of a twelve-year-old girl in the form of a seventy-six-page PowerPoint presentation. Despite the nearly universal acclaim that the novel had received, critics had trouble deciding whether the PowerPoint was a dazzling, avant-garde innovation or, as one reviewer described it, “a wacky literary gimmick,” a cheap trick that diminished the over-all value of the novel. In an interview with Egan, the novelist Heidi Julavits confessed to dreading the chapter before she read it, and then experiencing a happy relief once she had. “I live in fear of the gimmicky story that fails to rise above its gimmick,” she said. “But within a few pages I totally forgot about the PowerPoint presentation, that’s how ungimmicky your gimmick was.”

 

Books Purchased August 2021

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson. (audible audiobook). 29 August.

 

As I said, many books read, only one bought. A good ratio.  And, in September, I finished Davidson's book.