The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard
I first saw this ‘book’ at Moes books in Berkeley. It is actually a glossy style magazine reprinted in a series called REsearch which describes itself as ‘fascinated with society’s fringe elements’ and was published in 1990. Originally published in the UK in 1970, It…
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
I came to this book via a review of Hazzard’s work in the New York Review of Books calling this her masterpiece. It starts slowly, revolving around two sisters, Grace and Caro Bell who emigrate to England from Australia in the fifties. We are introduced…
Marcel Duchamp by Octavio Paz
Critics who loved Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ laughed and scoffed when they saw ‘Given’ unveiled after his death in 1969. The ‘Large Glass’ was esoteric and encoded while ‘Given’ was like a carny freak show equipped with a peephole, a naked female body and fake edenic…
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon decides to take on Humboldt county and shakes it up in his wild eighties ride with stoners and mini-movie moguls, pop culture loving tow truck operators and renegade film makers. There are rich kids and Japanese businessmen but not of the buttoned up variety. Sexy…
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
‘I first read “Memento Mori” in high school. I think I reread it sometime in my late twenties and I just finished my third time around at age 50.’ Now I am sixty three finishing my fourth reading of this touchstone book. Now I am…
All the Sinners bleed by S.A. Cosby
Read this book as part of our book group. It was on the list of best thrillers by a New York Times reviewer. The trope of the vicious serial killer is not enjoyable for me. I don’t mind violence or even expressions of evil but…
Mimesis; the Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach
(2nd reading) ‘Auerbach’s genius is his ability to both engage his texts in close, illuminating and rigorous analysis and to make these text speak for entire epochs, showing how people define themselves and their concerns.’ I wrote that after completing Mimesis seven years ago. While…
Life Studies by Robert Lowell
More than sixty years since publication, it is hard now to see why this book was groundbreaking. It contains many poems and an autobiographical piece of prose. Strangely, the autobiographical piece is what was groundbreaking formally and a few of the poems in the last…
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
I read this book when I was young, in my early twenties and I found the book bewildering. I had no frame of reference for the character’s struggle. By that time I had read about the struggles of black people but from the perspective and…
Duchamp, love and death, even by Juan Antonio Ramirez
I have lost track of how many books I have read on Marcel Duchamp but it is approaching double digits. To say that I am obsessed with him is an understatement. He has changed my life by providing a channel, a groove, a way of…
The Lives of Fungi by Britt Bunyard
This beautiful volume which makes fungi look sexy and intriguing was a guilty purchase. It is both a coffee book with its beautiful photos and also encyclopedic covering how they reproduce, the nature of their chemistry, the various categories including saprobes, parasites, pathogens and how…
The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson
Last year I read Benjamin’s ‘One-Way Street’ and understood only a fraction of it. I had read Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism’ which while stimulating was a difficult slog and when I saw ‘The Benjamin Files’ I grabbed it. I’m not sure what made me turn to a…