End Zone

This early novel by Don DeLillo contains several striking, cinematic scenes, but it is mostly arid, snide, and repellent.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

This autobiographical novel by Mario Vargas Llosa is probably his most light-hearted. A young man's love affair with his aunt (by marriage) is interwoven with increasingly bizarre radio soap opera tales by a Bolivian writer in Lima in the 1950s. Like all of Vargas Llosa's books, the construction would put a fine Swiss watch to shame. The sly humor and humbling biographical content make Aunt Julia especially appealing.

Nobel

Haydn's music can produce a kind of ecstasy. This year's Nobel winner, Tomas Transtromer, in his poem "Allegro," gets at that:

After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Literary Life: A Second Memoir

This Larry McMurtry book is tossed-off, episodic, half-assed, anecdotal, and entertaining. You could say a lot worse about a memoir.