Looking back, I was surprised to find that somewhere along the line, I’d stopped making entries in my Books Read list. Curiously, this was a period in which I discovered two writers who leaped to the top of my favorite living novelists esteem, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker, two incredibly versatile writers who (fortunately) cannot be pigeonholed. Since this span of reading includes about a dozen of their volumes (half of them from the public library), I won’t try to summarize the works – they deserve long entries on their own – but I will note that The Everlasting Story of Nory opens with something I’d long argued for fiction: for the first 50 pages, there is seemingly no conflict at play, which somehow heightens the tension all the more. And I love the way Baker can handle a sentence of 250 to 300 words, a rarity in our era. Lethem, meanwhile, can construct a fat novel – and how – with insight, imagination, and flair.
These encounters – joined with Andre Dubus and Russell Banks – came as a relief after a stretch in which I wasn’t finding anybody in the current scene who was moving me the way, say, Kerouac, Kesey, or Vonnegut had back when I was in college. (Or even Brautigan, right after.) What a relief! And maybe, as I would hope, my standards have risen.
This period also includes discovering my most detested contemporary novelist, who will go unnamed. Tossing a string of senselessly murdered bodies in our direction does nothing to raise my sense of humanity. Quite the opposite. And with his professions of religious faith, I find no excuse for such nihilism. Nory, by contrast, delivers on all counts.
I also read Ernest Hebert’s Live Free or Die and Spoonwood, with their requisite New Hampshire perspectives. (His work is anchored in the distinctive Monadnock region of the Granite State.)
Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, with its portrayals of the Plymouth Brethren in England, also led to the father’s marvelous illustrations of tide pool life, something I’m now pursuing every summer.
Kay Davis Coltrane’s Centre Friends: The Legacy of the Meeting on the Hill is a fat, thoroughly illustrated history of the Quaker congregation my Hodgson ancestors helped settle in North Carolina in the 1750s. Wonderful work.
Also, I reread Julian Barnes’ Proust’s Parrot and Proust’s Madame Bovary, and Tuesday’s With Morey.
Jnana's Red Barn 
Perhaps it was typo? Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary.
Indeed. This series originated as a private set of notes, some of them comforted by post-surgery painkillers when my recovery included an ambitious stack of backlogged reading.
When I came across them a few months ago and thought they’d make for a fun January of postings, well, as we said in the newspaper biz, you’re your own worst copy editor. But that goes with all of my postings, as well.
Any other corrections will be most welcome, if for no other reason than to keep the record straight.
As for my opinions, they are what they were then. Ahem.