What I was reading from in May
Justin Carter’s forthcoming Brazos (2024)
The book’s poems are rooted in place and sincerity. Here’s where to preorder Brazos, and here’s an interview between Justin and myself about the book.
Dan Chamas’ Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022)
The first 300 pages of the book are amazing in terms of how they get into Dilla’s processes for production and composition. Those pages also contextualize well a genre of music at a crossroads (or two) in the late ‘90s/early ’00s. The last 100 pages felt a bit strained in their efforts to drive home the existence of Dilla’s legacy, as if the first 300 pages hadn’t already done the work.
Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016)
Well-written. Enjoyed it. More of a whimper at the end. I think that’s something of the point to be honest. Some lives ripple into periphery spaces.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
There should be a documentary about how tedious the research process for this book likely was for Crews.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022)
This book is good, and if you’re at all familiar with Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, well, Trust kind of works like an informal sequel. That first novel sees Diaz imagining what it must have been like for a larger than life individual to become lost and contextualized within a wild frontier. Trust is all about the world of finance and, from what I can tell about 135 pages into it, how that world is as much or more fanciful than the any notion or thought that preceded it.
Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage (2022)
I genuinely enjoyed reading this book better than I remember it. There’s something rather fleeting about these stories, but I could also see my future self returning to them.
John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016)
This one contains a story within a story, like a bigger fish somehow got swallowed by the smaller fish. I’m right smackdab in the middle of that swallowed story. Call me Ishmael (or some such nonsense).
David Maraniss’ They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003)
Gonna be a long, informative ride to the end of this one. It’s a tome. And I’m about 67 pages from the beginning.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937)
The kindergartner and I have put off finishing this book in lieu of building train tracks.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
“The Council of Elrond” is the longest chapter in the history of the written word. The seven-year-old simultaneously daydreams, dozes off, and hangs on every word about Gollum.
Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasio and Ukraine’s War of Independence (2024)
The weirdest aspect of this book to date is how these events from 2022 read as if already ancient history. I guess what’s done is done and what isn’t is not.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Songs for the Flames (translated 2020)
The dust jackets for Vásquez’s books always include a reference to Gabriel García Márquez — and there’s an obvious reason for that — but the reason has little to do with Vásquez’s writing. While more often than not concerned with the same geographies, Vásquez’s Colombia has already seen the throes of Modernity. His writing is already through the door in a Film Noir upon which Márquez’s butterflies and generals knocked.
I’m trying to think who the better comp for Vásquez’s writing is, but I’m drawing a blank at the moment. What’s probably true, too, is that if I were to read that author again, then I’d probably just say they remind me of Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I’ve read a few of his books now. I think The Sound of Things Falling is still my favorite. But I have one story to go in Songs for the Flames.
