What I’m reading from in March
Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016)
I’m about thirty pages into this one, so I really just started it. However, I didn’t know much about it prior to those thirty pages. A fellow teacher I once shared a classroom with read it shortly after its release and a write up in The New Yorker. I think she was about thirty to a hundred pages into it when I last spoke to her about it five or six years ago. She downplayed it, or at least downplayed the quality of Cline’s writing. And, given this book was published five months before Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory and three years before Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it seems that in looking back at the cultish gravity of the 1960s Cline was seeing her way into a lot of the harmful nonsense of today and the ways in which art digests reality. America likes cults is all I’m saying.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
Work’s been busy, so this one has just kind of sat on hold for the month.
Nathaniel Duggan’s Death Egg (2023)
A good, clean vomit blast of poetry.
Ian Frazier’s Coyote v. ACME (1996)
The title story is fun, but so is the one about Don Johnson and the one about the Impressionists and pretty much all the ones from cover to cover. But what makes the book tick is the deft sequencing. “Coyote v. ACME” is sandwiched by a sendup of Bob Hope titled “Thanks for the Memory” and “In the Plain Air” starring Manet, Monet, and Renoir. And this arc pretty much supports whatever this book might be saying about low brow comedy, highbrow art, and American celebrity and wealth.
Timothy Gowers’ Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002)
Probably read this one because my wife is a high school math teacher and I wanted to make some joke about this being how we met.
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955)
I started this one two nights ago. I read the introduction and about ten pages of the novel. So far there’s some stuff about opium dens and the tension between liberty and order. I saw the movie, but I only remember like two scenes. I’ve read Greene’s Our Man in Havana and the short story that gets referenced in Donnie Darko.
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice (2009)
I have a hundred to go in this one. I don’t know if it’s better necessarily, but I’ve enjoyed it much more than The Crying of Lot 49. I kind of wonder if I need to reread The Crying of Lot 49.
Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes (2023)
Every once in a while, a person needs to read a book on physics in order to fact check Christopher Nolan movies.
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021)
Finished this one a couple weeks ago. It reads like three novellas, but the last ten to twenty pages bring a mighty sum to those parts.
