caterina.net : books

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Books read in 2002
Books read in 2001
Books read in 2000
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I buy almost all my books at Powells if I am buying them online. Free shipping, even to Canada and Mexico, with purchases of $50.00 or more.

An attempt to list every book I've ever read

And another list of every book I own, or owned. (As distinguished from every book I've read.)
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Some other people who keep book lists:

Jessamyn
My Dog Meg
Calamondin
Snarkout
Markand
Jeremy
Art Garfunkel
PB
Duck for cover
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Books I've read recently:

December 2001

As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
(Short Stories)
(12.17.01)
I'm happy to say that I reread and finally appreciated the formerly loathed As I Lay Dying. My loathing was based on the first 100 pages, assigned to me in high school. I remember throwing the book down in disgust as the first vulture appeared, and the useless Bundren family trundled stupidly on. The second time around I still found the first 100 pages bracingly dull, bleak and disgusting, but the difference this time was that I didn't quit when I most wanted to and forced myself to follow it to the end. The bit about Addie and the preacher, the drug store advice given to Dewey Dell, and Anse and his teeth were unmistakably penned by a genius and I understood then why Faulkner is Faulkner. I'm thrilled to discover I love his work, after my somewhat ho-hum response to Light in August. On to The Sound and the Fury. On to Absalom, Absalom. On to Go Down, Moses
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Making Waves
by Mario Vargas Llosa
(Essays)
(12.15.01)
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Later Short Stories
by Anton Chekhov
(Short Stories)
(12.07.01)
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Demonology
by Rick Moody
(Short Stories)
I was unawed by this collection of short stories, which are largely experimental in form, and while I applaud messing around with form, it's generally a riskier authorial activity, and thus it is far easier to fail. As you may have noticed elsewhere on this site, The Ice Storm is one of my favorite books, and Moody one of my favorite authors. He seems to be taking the short story form as the site for his experimentations; his three novels, while far from traditional, adhere to a more or less conventional narrative form, and for whatever reason, with Moody's writing, this is what I prefer. (12.01.01)
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November 2001

Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
(Personal Essays)
(11.27.01)I wanted to laugh as much as I laughed reading Naked, but I only sniggered occasionally. It is difficult to squeeze fresh humor from the experience of learning a foreign language and living in a foreign country, especially when the language is French and the country is France. The parts of Naked that I found truly hilarious were the portraits of his family, and in Me Talk Pretty One Day when his family appeared, so did the belly laughs.
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Hopscotch
by Julio Cortazar
(Fiction)
(11.27.01)
My expectations were high for this one, leading to the inevitable (lately) disappointment.
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Architecture Without Architects : A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture.
by Bernard Rudofsky
(Architecture)
Sure, it's a skinny book, mostly pictures and few words, but it will rearrange the way you see the world -- especially the built world -- around you. A chronicle of the kinds of buildings that are less and less common, replaced by cinderblock cubes with corrugated steel roofs in developing countries, and a testament of the losses we've suffered as a planet, architecturally. Beautiful, it nonetheless made me terribly sad. (11.25.01)
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Plainwater
by Anne Carson
(Essays & Poetry)
Anne Carson is a genius. (11.15.01)
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No Great Mischief
by Alistair MacLeod
(Fiction) (11.15.01) A lackluster read. I found it completely implausible that the MacCullum family of Cape Breton just sat around saying "Remember when? Remember when? Remember when?" all the time, and telling each other tales that they would obviously all know. I mean, flashbacks, please, without the annoying introductory, "Remember when?"s. It could've been well bookmarked by the present at the beginning and the present at the end with the past in the middle. Beyond this glaring flaw, it was a solid, if not remarkable, nostalgic east coast Canadian-Scotch family story. I wanted to like it, especially because it was a gift from a Canadian (sorry Shannon!) but I have to say, no dice.
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
(Fiction) (11.11.01)
For the past two days I've been riveted to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, an astounding book and a book of genius. It is set in 1849-50 and follows the Glanton Gang on their orgy of slaughter along the Texas-Mexico border. It is without a doubt the most violent and bloody book I've ever read, an unflinching study of evil and the lust for war.

We meet a character identified only as "The Kid" when he is fourteen years old and running away from his home in Tennessee. Through various misadventures he ends up in jail, from which he is sprung by The Glanton Gang, a group of bloodthirsty men bent on killing and scalping as many Apaches as possible for the bounty paid by the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The spiritual leader of the Glanton Gang is Judge Holden, who we first meet on page 6, a 7 foot tall albino "bald as a stone" with no beard or brow or lashes, small hands and feet. He speaks all languages and knows all things. He dresses in finery and often appears naked. He rapes and kills little boys and little girls, spurs the gang on to further butchery, dances and fiddles and never sleeps and swears that he will never die. After speaking of how a game of cards on which the wager is death is the only real game, he says:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. [Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.] War is god.

We have page after page of rape, murder and bloodshed, battle after battle, more blood, more carnage, pitiless, relentless, endless. There is a magnificent story of how the gang was out of gunpowder with the Apaches mere minutes away and Holden, wizard-like, conjures gunpowder out of dirt, ashes and piss. At the end of the book (don't read this if you want the ending kept for the end) there is a final confrontation between The Kid, now forty-five, and Judge Holden, untouched by time. It is the most chilling scene that I have ever read. I have already reread the whole chapter five times. They meet by chance in a saloon, and watch a dancing bear being killed and Holden lectures the kid, now called "the man" that all dancers that are not warriors -- murderers -- are false dancers, since dancing is the warrior's right, and his only. The Kid offers his laconic replies. You aint nothin he says, and Holden says, You speak truer than you know. Holden murders the Kid in an outhouse outside the saloon. Of all the murders in the books, hundreds of which are recounted in graphic detail, this one is a cipher, a void. Moments later we find Holden inside:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

It makes me shudder again, rereading it.
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Oh What a Paradise It Seems
by John Cheever
(Fiction) (11.09.01)
I stayed up all night reading a short book by John Cheever What a Paradise It Seems which was, from what I can gather, his last.

That things had been better was the music, the reprise of his days. It had been sung by his elders, by his associates, he had heard it sung in college by Toynbee and Spengler. Things had been better, things were getting worse, and the lengthening moral and intellectual shadows that one saw spreading over the Western World were final. What a bore it had been to live in this self-induced autumnal twilight!

There's a whole essay to be written here about the elegiac tone of this book, about the things trampled by the inexorable march of progress, about the vestiges of the ancient and the prior in fast food, nomadism, psychotherapy and supermarkets, about the genius of Cheever's use of the first person narrator, omniscient and sad, of how the book seems to wander off into irrelevant asides which turn out to be pertinent, and not only pertinent, but deeply meaningful, more so for their obliquity, and how the title of the book Oh What a Paradise It Seems is repeated on the last page in the (exclamatory) past tense: "What a paradise it seemed!" and why all of this is so wonderful -- but today I cannot do it. I'm too tired from having stayed up all night reading it, and am grumpy from having to sit around the house waiting for a delivery all day. However, let it be noted: I am touting this book, all of Cheever's works, and staying up all night reading in general.

Now, back to my grumping.
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Briar Rose
by Robert Coover
(Fiction) (11.08.01)
A disappointment. I had been so taken by Ghost Town (see below) that I had high hopes for this once, another postmodern genre pastiche, this time satirizing the Fairy Tale. Why the disappointment? Perhaps because I hate reading about wilting ladies so much (see review of Lithium for Medea below) and Sleeping Beauty -- Briar Rose -- was such a lameass. The evil fairy godmother's raw mutilations of the traditional fairy tales was the best part, but we needed more of her and less of the dimensionless paperboard princess and Handsome Prince. I mean, I realize that was the point -- their paperboardliness -- but it was boring and annoying. Nor do I condemn or contemn boringness. Boringness can be a real feature -- some of my best friends are boring -- but boring and annoying? Too much. That I also hate the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses (chapter 13) is probably related. (I LOVE chapter 14 -- Oxen of the Sun -- but that's for another review.) (Best friends, please note. The above comment does not apply to you.)
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The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
by Mario Vargas Llosa
(Fiction) (11.01.01)

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October 2001

Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
(Fiction) (10.30.01)
You really want me to review the grey eminence that is Tolstoy?! Nothing doing.
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The North China Lover
by Marguerite Duras
(Fiction) (10.21.01)
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Practicalities
by Marguerite Duras
(Fiction) (10.20.01)
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The Sandman:
Preludes and Nocturnes, Book 1
Ther Doll's House, Book 2
Dream Country, Book 3
by Neil Gaiman
(Comic Book)
(10.15.01)
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The Magic Kingdom
by Stanley Elkin
(Fiction)
Phenomenal. Enter the consciousness of seven dying children and their wards on a last "dream holiday" at Disney World. Unsentimental portrait of the brattiness and brilliance that alternates in children and some ridiculously flawed yet sympathetic adults. Watch them bungle their way towards transcendence in America's crassest entertainment kingdom. Breathtaking. Excellent. Wordy. An ode to life. (10.11.01)
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Smarter Than You Think
by Paul Loeb
(Non-Fiction)
This book has excellent, must-read and must-heed advice on dog care and training but the writing is astoundingly bad. Had the Simon & Schuster editor of this book completed fifth grade? How did this get to print? I could find no explanation for its disorganization, clumsy metaphors, laughable cutesiness, indexless muddledness, until I looked at the back cover photos and author bios. I was forced to assume that the heavily made-up bottle-blonde "contributor" in the glamour shot was sleeping with the animal trainer, Paul Loeb, achieved access to the text, and summarily mangled it following a lover's quarrel. Whoever was responsible, I was forced to read it twice to glean the information, and when I referred back to it, it was impossible to find what I was looking for. I ought to make a 3 page PowerPoint presentation of this book and save you the agony and 12 bucks. I haven't encountered prose this bad since last week.

Nonetheless, my new puppy has been trained for two weeks using these methods and has responded admirably. After an hour, he came whenever his name was called. He's making excellent progress in house training, and his diet is based on the one recommended in the book. I agree with everything Loeb says about how to speak with the dog, how to get his attention, and some of the tricks -- like sticking a moistened cardboard match up Fido's bunghole to make him poop, throwing something at your dog to get his attention -- are nearly miraculous in their effectiveness. So in spite of it all, I don't regret buying this book. I'll update this blurb as we progress, but Dos Pesos loves Paul Loeb and so, reluctantly, do I. (10.11.01)
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Worms eat my Garbage
by Mary Applehof
(Non-Fiction)
One of those cozy do-it-yourself manuals by earnest grassroots activists about worm composting. I got a worm composting bin, worms and this manual from the City of Vancouver, and have been composting all my kitchen waste in the bin. No smell, no varmints, and plenty of rich vermicompost have resulted. Environmentalists, do-gooders, gardeners, worm-lovers and the curious, check it out. It's fun. (10.10.01)
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Lithium for Medea
by Kate Braverman
(Fiction)
Poetic, overwrought story of a pathetic 27-year-old woman whose (gambling-addicted) father is dying of cancer, whose mother is an overachieving neurotic with a secret past and who is herself involved in a masochistic dependent relationship with a junkie. She becomes a junkie herself in order to win his love. She listens to her father go on piteously about his dying, murders a cat as a means of self-empowerment? or to break up with the guy? or to propitiate the death god? or something?, recollects a pointless and masochistic marriage with a libidoless intellectual, and decides at the end that abandoning her recovering father and taking a trip is what she needs to get her life in order. HellO? Gumptionless, passive self-subordinating women without agency, clue or job in the thrall of domineering men makes for a profoundly discouraging read, no matter how poetic the text. Avoid. (10.06.01)
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September 2001

The Quick and the Dead
by Joy Williams
(Fiction) (09.30.01)
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My Idea of Fun
by Will Self
(Fiction)A truly ghastly experience, My Idea of Fun records the memories, justifications and sheer relish of a delusional maniac, serial killer, animal torturer and all around repulsive fellow, couched in prose so purple it's no longer a part of the visible spectrum. As the protagonist's predilections are presented on the first page, you can't say you didn't know what you were getting into. Against the chidings of my conscience I continued reading, fascinated, much as you can't not look at a grisly automobile accident as you wheel by on the highway. You can't help but admire Self's turn of phrase, his dictionary squeezings, his calculated yet slick deployments of rib-cracking funniness, but you nonetheless wish he weren't quite so sick. The book is a compelling enough read. There are a couple flubbed hallucinatory sequences of a William Burroughs variety which I flat out skipped. I frankly didn't give a brown M & M about our protagonist's career in advertising or his (possibly meant to be loathsome?) yuppiedom. Self fell asleep on the job more than a few times, misplacing his character's characteristics, straining and failing to shock, including flat or pointless scenes. Only the scenes in which The Fat Controller played a part were gripping, though inevitably gripping a part of you you'd rather had never been gripped at all. By the end I was just turning pages and feeling icky. That the editors or the author were feeling somewhat insecure about whether or not this book was to be taken as satire is evidenced by the book's anxious subtitle A Cautionary Tale. Wash yourself thoroughly after reading this one, though that may not suffice. A colonic might be more appropriate. For the very susceptible, an exorcism. (09.16.01)
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Ghost Town
by Robert Coover
(Fiction) I LOVED this book. Pomo salacious Louis L'Amour. I can't do it justice right now. More on this one later. (09.08.01)
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Monstruary
by Julian Rios
(Fiction) (09.06.01)
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August 2001

Travels with Lizbeth
by Lars Eighen
(Memoir) A first-person account of homelessness by a gay dog-owner living in the relatively mellow environment of Austin, Texas, a college town. He makes a couple trips out west, hitchhiking all the way, hoping to become a writer in California, but fails to make enough of a living to stay, and goes back home. There's an interesting chapter about how dumpster diving works, where to go, what to look for, what you can and can't eat, and why the dumpster divers and can collectors are mortal enemies. (08.24.01)
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
by Angela Carter
(Fiction) (08.21.01)
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon
(Fiction) (08.19.01)
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Henderson the Rain King
by Saul Bellow
(Fiction) (08.15.01)
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The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
by Will Self
(Fiction) (08.12.01)
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Spanking the Maid
by Robert Coover
(Fiction) (08.10.01)
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Extinction
by Thomas Bernhard
(Fiction) (08.09.01)
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L'Amante Anglaise
by Marguerite Duras
(Fiction) (08.07.01)
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The Pornographer's Poem
by Michael Turner
(Fiction) (08.07.01)
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Les Guerrilleres
by Monique Wittig
(Fiction) (08.05.01)
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July 2001

The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
(Fiction) (07.31.01)
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Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
(Fiction) (07.31.01)
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Men in the Off Hours
by Anne Carson
(Poetry) (07.30.01)
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Louise Bourgeois
by Paul Gardner
(Art History/Biography) (07.28.01)
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Ferdydurke
by Witold Gombrowicz
(Fiction)
I liked it. Very much. Our protagonist, aged 30, is abducted by a professor who takes him back to a boy's boarding school and forces him to be an adolescent again, with all the grotesquerie that that implies: the bullying, the braggadoccio, the tedium, the fascination with dirty words, the embarrassments of the budding body and the endless, endless posturing. Interspersed are reflections on form and content, the place of art in society, rants against Gombrowicz's supposed detractors, and episodes of great slapstick comedy. I blushed several times after laughing out loud in public places, laughing those awful bark-laughs I am helpless to prevent. But this is also a very thinky book. In this topsy-turvical novel, two apparently unrelated, but nonetheless resonant, short stories are included in the middle of the book, both of which are preceded by essay-length introductions, explanations or apologies for these two stories. The narrative form of the surrounding stories is otherwise very traditional, while the sentence and paragraph structure are not. "The profoundest of the late moderns," says John Updike, and I concur. Ferdydurke is excessive, compelling, brilliant, hilarious, dark, deep. (07.27.01)
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A History of Forgetting
by Caroline Adderson
(Fiction) (07.17.01)
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Pastoralia
by George Saunders
(Fiction)
Short Stories. Hilarious. Biting. Clever. About the indignities of living here, now, in this consumer culture where we are ourselves the consumed; the cruelties we subject one another to in order to get the things we think we need; most of all, about how we have failed, are failing, will fail. Saunders so skillfully reproduces how language is butchered in contemporary speech, we were slinging around Saunders paraphrases for a week. I resisted pressing my copy into other people's hands, since I wanted to read it again myself, just one more time. (07.15.01)
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Eros the bittersweet
by Anne Carson
(Non-Fiction) (07.04.01)
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June 2001

Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
(Poetry) (06.28.01)
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Beowulf
translated by Seamus Heaney
(Poetry) (06.25.01)
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A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
(Non-Fiction) (06.22.01)
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What if our world is their heaven?
by Philip K. Dick
(Interview) (06.15.01)
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Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
by Martin Amis
(Essays) (06.14.01)
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Concrete
by Thomas Bernhard
(Fiction)
Brilliant. We find ourselves inside the mind of an obssessed neurotic recluse, who has been trying fruitlessly for ten years to write the first sentence of what is to be his great work on Bartholdy Mendelsson. He simultaneously needs and loathes and admires and suspects his sister, and believes that she is deliberately undermining his writing efforts and self esteem. When he is at last able to wrench himself out of his paralysis and country hermitage to travel to Spain, he is confronted with a woman whose problems dwarf his own. The prose is maddeningly involuted but nonetheless hilarious, and when the end of the book comes, bam! you say, this guy Bernhard is a genius. (06.07.01)
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V
by Thomas Pynchon
(Fiction) (06.06.01)
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May 2001

Familiar Spirits
by Alison Lurie
(Memoir) (05.30.01)
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Last Call
by Tim Powers
(Science Fiction) (05.29.01)
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The Dreams our Stuff is Made of
by Thomas Disch
(History of Science Fiction) (05.17.01)
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Up the Walls of the World
by James Tiptree, Jr.
(Science Fiction) (05.15.01)
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Object to be Destroyed: The work of Gordon Matta-Clark
by Pamela M. Lee
(Art History) (05.07.01)
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Amphibious Living (Dutch)
by Various Authors
(Non-Fiction) (05.03.01)
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March 2001

The Great Good Place
by Ray Oldenburg
(Non-Fiction)(03.22.01)
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Seaside
by Steve Brooks
(Non-Fiction)
Seaside, Florida is best known as the setting for the movie "The Truman Show", a little slice of pastel perfection on the Florida panhandle. It is given as the classic example of New Urbanism, which emphasizes human-scale buildings and facades, walkability and an end of car-driven culture and urban sprawl. This was a fairly rah-rah coffee table book, full of idealized pictures, giving a general overview of where and how and why. More picture than idea here. (03.22.01)
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The Dark-Light Years
by Brian Aldiss
(Science Fiction)
An almost brilliant, characteristically dark SF novel about a scatalogical alien and the cruelty and callousness of humanity. I wish Aldiss hadn't been writing to fulfill contract obligations or for alimony money or whatever was pushing him, because it's very clear that this one was not done. Given more time and editing this could have been a great one. Aldiss is one of the very best. I'm still catching up. (03.23.01)
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Ubik
by Philip K. Dick
(Science Fiction)
Wow! Hold onto your skull so your mind doesn't get blown. One of Dick's best. People get put on ice when they're just about to die, and are revived for special consultations with the living. (03.22.01)
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Air Guitar
by Dave Hickey
(Art Criticism)
Loved it. Read it. Perhaps I'll write more about this when I'm inclined. In the interim, read Sarah Vowell about the book. (02.25.01)
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Chromophobia
by David Batchelor
(Art Criticism)
Brilliant first chapter! Then rambling, repetitive. Should have been an essay, not a book. Dave Hickey's review in BookForum is all you need, really. (01.25.01)
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Out of Egypt
by Andre Aciman
(Memoir)
(01.18.01)
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The Giant's House
by Elizabeth McCracken
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A deeply passionate and claustrophobic book about an unusualpair of lovers: a reserved and resigned librarian at a small town library in New England, and a boy 16 years her junior, who grows to be a towering giant, over 8 feet tall. It was too small for my purposes at the time, so I can't review this one fairly -- it was clearly written plain and wry -- in the best of possible ways. I wanted breadth, I wanted scope, I wanted zeitgeist, and war and universal tragedy, and this story was contained in one small, albeit very tall, house, and the repercussions were, for the most part, local. (01.12.01)
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Digital Mantras
by Steven R. Holzman
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I don't know how I acquired this item, but it was in a stack of books earmarked for donation to Goodwill that was in the back of my car, and at one point, stuck waiting for someone at his office, I grabbed it out of the pile and started reading it. Written around '93-'94, it traces the development of "generative grammars" through various disciplines such as linguistics, painting, and music, up through "VR" and the use of computers in the construction of art. The latter chapters have that breathless and awestruck tone that characterized so much prognosticatory technological writing of the day, but the book can be quite illuminating to see how these structures inform, and have informed various schools of thought vis-a-vis language and art. It's a multi-disciplinary survey along the lines of Godel, Escher, Bach, with some interstitial musings on Himalayan spirituality thrown in. All in all, it's an excellent and articulate primer on some basic ideas of systems and their place in history and in our time. (01.10.01)
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