notes
This was pretty disappointing. I had never read R. A. Lafferty before and wanted to like it, but other than a couple of stories (“Le Hot Sport”, “Adam Had Three Brothers”) these didn’t do much for me. This is volume 5 of 8 I think, so he was really prolific, remarkable since he didn’t start writing until his 40s.
notes
This is Charles Portis’s first book and the third of his five books I have read. Great characters and deadpan dialogue. I liked it, but maybe I should have read it first instead of comparing it to Dog of the South, one of the funniest books ever.
This was adapted as a movie starring Glen Campbell (as was True Grit), but I have yet to track it down.
notes
This is Vollmann’s first book. It’s very Pynchon-esque, as was noted by nearly everyone when it came out. I stopped early on trying to understand what was really going on and just went along with it. A lot of it was funny and I liked it more than the recent Pynchon I read. I started and gave up on Europe Central years ago but plan to go back to it at some point after reading and enjoying this one.
notes
Fever and Spear is the first of a trilogy. It’s a spy novel sort of but not entirely since it deals with a lot of metaphysical ideas. I wasn’t expecting it to end on a kind of cliffhanger, so I need to read the other two if/when I ever come across them.
notes
This was a quick, easy read (I read it over the summer at the pool) about Shirley raising her kids. It’s a departure from her creepy horror novels and stories. Apparently she wrote a follow-up.
notes
There are a lot of stories in here considering it’s a 650+ page book and most of them are only 5-10 pages long. They felt like sketches. The better ones were the few longer 20ish page stories, maybe because they had more room to breathe. Not a lot of them stuck with me compared to the Saul Bellow book I read before this that was packed with memorable stories.
notes
I feel like Bellow fell out of fashion along with the other post-war white dudes. These are great stories though. Every time I read him I think I should read more, and yet his books tend to sit on my shelf for a while. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” and “Something to Remember Me By” were both standouts.
