Enough

Cassidy Hutchinson's book carried few surprises, despite all the hype it generated. I kept wondering about the overly long sections on her childhood and adolescence, but when you're 25 if you don't include your childhood the book probably comes in at under 100 pages. The sad message here is that we have arrived at a place where when a political operative eventually is persuaded to tell the truth, she is counted as a "hero."

Not Funny

Jena Friedman first came to my attention with her TV series Indefensible, about the manifold failures of the justice system. Her book is sharp and occasionally funny.

Bartlelby and Me

Gay Talese is the finest living prose stylist. His deceptively simple, crystalline sentences are a perfect match for his ordered and ruthlessly observant mind. All three of the sections in Batlelby are winning, but the account of the Upper East Side townhouse that was destroyed by its owner is the most gripping.

Dictatorship

Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa's graphic novel primer on how dictatorships are fueled, born and thrive is exceptionally relevant. The work by artist Kasia Babis is superb.

Close to Home

The North Irish writer Michael Magee's debut novel was widely praised, but I found it hopelessly dark. Too often reading it felt like being hit in the head with a hammer. As a picture of a ruinous drug culture I suppose it has its place.

Cannery Row

Catching up on books I read months ago is a good test of their staying power. Steinbeck's Cannery Row is wise and wistful, and invites a further re-exploration of this deeply humane writer.

The Scoreless Thai

With Lawrence Block and his funny punny titles, you know what to expect, and he usually delivers. This time the sleepless spy Tanner is off to the jungles of Southeast Asia for a ripping adventure.

Slowness

Milan Kundera's short novel was published some 30 years ago but is remarkably prescient in its critique of speed, which has become not just an aesthetic threat but possibly a moral one too. Unconventional with its time jumps and multiple points of view, Slowness is in fact a very conservative and traditional appeal to stop rushing around to no purpose.

Mile Marker Zero

William McKeen delivers an entertaining survey of artists and other weird characters in Key West, focusing on the 1970s. Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, Thomas McGuane, and lesser known but no less colorful figures enliven the text.

Look at the Lights, My Love

I will read anything by Annie Ernaux that I can get my hands on, but this one feels half-assed.

The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones

This mid-60s novel by Jesse Hill Ford will be in the running for my best book read in 2023. It is a racial story loaded with vivid and believable characters, and it pulls no punches in finding fault in all concerned.

Chain-Gang All-Stars

This is a novel set in the near future in which prisoners battle each other to the death in a televised gladiatorial spectacle. It puts one in mind of dystopian films like Rollerball or The Running Man, and I'm guessing it was written with an eye to the film rights. The characters don't convince, however.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

Tom Hanks' first time out as a novelist is a qualified success. His writing style is no worse than Stephen King's, and this book has the advantage of giving the reader a step-by-step behind-the-scenes account of how movies are made. 

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond makes a strong case for the proposition that poverty exists in America because most Americans are comfortable with it. He marshals figures showing how the poor are taxed more heavily than the rich, how banks take advantage of the poor, and why poverty programs are undersubscribed (hint: that's how we the people want it).

Ignorance: A Global History

 Peter Burke's survey of ignorance reveals where it can be helpful as well as harmful. 

Incident at Vichy

Arthur Miller's one-act play is especially relevant today, a time of rising fascism. Every citizen must stand and be counted.

The Pornography Wars

Kelsy Burke's history of porn is evenhanded to a fault and gives good historical context for the current debate on sex workers and exploitation.

Getting Past the Past

While it is much too vaporous in many spots, this account by Lewis Hyde of the uses of forgetting nevertheless makes a strong case for why it's often best to just let things go.

Conquest of the Useless

Werner Herzog's diaries of his making of Fitzcarraldo provide a vivid picture of the monomania of the film director.

Unscripted

Unscripted tells the tawdry tale of Sumner Redstone and Les Moonves. Redstone was virtually held captive by sleazy gold-diggers as he approached death, and Moonves is revealed as a sick, slick pig. 

Monster

Subtitled "Living Off the Big Screen," this account by John Gregory Dunne tells the fascinating and labyrinthine tale of how the film Up Close and Personal got made – after many years, dozens of rewrites, and financial shenanigans by the studios. What started out as a biopic of doomed anchorwoman Jessica Savitch became something else entirely as executives waffled, demanded rewrites, and lied. That the film was made at all seems a miracle after reading this account.

The Big Myth

The myth of the title of this historical account by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway is the idea that government does nothing well and private industry does everything well. In addition, the authors give a well-deserved thrashing to the idea that the "free market" has flourished without government help. The Big Myth provides a detailed and at times numbingly dense narrative of how the American public has been hoodwinked by PR into believing a set of facts that are opposed to their own self-interests. And the campaign began decades before Reagan set the myth into stone.

Aznavour by Aznavour

Charles Aznavour's autobiography, published in 1970, covers some fascinating ground. The child of Armenian immigrants to Paris, born in 1924, he came to show business early, performing in plays and music halls as a child. The section on how he and his family survived during the German occupation in World War II is full of compelling day-by-day detail. But the highlight of this volume must be his account of his time with Edith Piaf as her assistant and all-around doormat. There was true affection there on both sides, but Piaf was notoriously difficult. Much of the first half of the book is taken up with his songwriting rather than with his singing. Until he made his triumph as a singer, selling songs to other singers was his bread and butter. There's not much on Aznavour's film career, disappointingly, and nothing about his work starring in the Truffaut film Shoot the Piano Player. 

Me Tanner, You Jane

Lawrence Block goes wild in this installment of the Evan Tanner spy series. The sexual exploits would not pass muster in today's world, but the pacing will keep a reader eagerly flipping pages.

So Big

Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks the question, How do you live a meaningful life? The main character, Selina DeJong, is a memorable and sincere seeker after beauty and meaning. (On her first trip to a farm, she finds the cauliflower beautiful, which sets the farmer to laughing.) Selina is skeptical of material success, which leads to a split with her son when he becomes a successful bond salesman. There is no whiff of cynicism or facile cleverness in this deeply felt and deftly expressed novel.

Tanner's Tiger

Lawrence Block's Evan Tanner – "the world's most unusual spy" – travels to Montreal and the '68 Expo to try to penetrate and defeat a scheme by Communist Cuba. It goes down smooth and leaves little aftertaste.

The Years

This is Annie Ernaux's longest and most comprehensive look into her life, starting at childhood and taking her to nearly 60. With the personal come commonplace observations about the world around her. Although I admire and respect all of the books I have read since hearing her name for the first time when she won the Nobel, I am about done with Madame Ernaux.

Giant

Edna Ferber's bestselling novel from the 1950s is an exploration and condemnation of the conquest of Texas by white families. The repeated "we do things differently here" theme gets a bit tiresome, and Ferber has a tic in which she strings together items in a series without commas, but overall this is a fine old-fashioned novel of manners with a splash of social criticism.

Getting Lost

Annie Ernaux's diary of a yearlong affair with a Russian diplomat is repetitive and, for all its reputation for brutal honesty, at times reticent. Ernaux does put herself out there, it is true. In fact she often makes herself look pitiful pining for this man and hanging on his every phone call. The writer in her believes that nothing that is not written ever happened, but sometimes things happen that don't merit writing down. This is a case where a novelization of this affair would have been interesting, but Ernaux's colossal self-regard would not have it.

Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff's book is billed as a look at the "escape fantasies" of billionaires, but it's more helpfully a dissection of how the mindset of "move fast and break things" is ruining the planet. Like Sarah Kendzior's book They Knew, Survival demonstrates how all of the grand plans that billionaires have to save the planet leave 99 percent of the population behind. In both books, the great unwashed are shown to be little more than a nuisance to these men. Rushkoff explains that rather than fixing things incrementally and with a sense of modesty, hyper-libertarian tech bros must all start from zero (throw everything out) and go exponentially beyond any rational solution to the problem. Rushkoff leaves the reader with an ominous warning: "We've never seen a society avoid fascism when it gets to this stage of economic inequality, or civilization avoid collapse when it has taxed its physical environment to this extent."

The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's depiction of a decline of a way of life, and his explication of the Sicilian mind, are elegant and perceptive.

Masters of Atlantis

This Charles Portis novel has an overwhelming feel of being half-assed. The tone of winking satire becomes unbearable after a while.

Black Sunday

Thomas Harris's thriller about a planned terrorist attack on the Super Bowl impresses with its detail, suspense, side plots, and dialogue. In short, it succeeds in every way.

Super-Infinite

Subtitled "The Transformations of John Donne," this is a fangirl biography for the general reader that gives in quick, sharp strokes the life and themes of England's greatest love-poet.

Happening and A Simple Passion

Two more memoir/novels from Annie Ernaux: the first about her difficulties getting an abortion in the early 1960s, and the second about a sexual affair she carried on with a married diplomat from Eastern Europe. Happening was turned into an effective film, which like the book looks at Ernaux's quest in matter-of-fact and unblinking terms. A Simple Passion is a short and precise description of an obsession: the irrational behaviors, the waiting, the hoping – all told brutally, honestly and (maybe not surprisingly for this writer) without recourse to the sexually explicit.

A Girl's Story

The differences between this 2016 book by Annie Ernaux and the earlier ones I've read are telling. Here there is a more writerly, ingrown approach amid the clarity and honesty that was overwhelming in the previous works. Ernaux has evolved, it would seem, and not entirely for the better, from writing about a woman to writing about a woman while writing about writing. Still, the deep insights into a girl's life are worth the trip into a few metaphysical and intellectual ratholes.

Red Dragon

Thomas Harris's first Hannibal Lecter novel, made into a solid film by Michael Mann, is rich procedurally and in its characterizations. Lecter is a supporting character; the killer is the Tooth Fairy, later the Red Dragon, every bit as interesting and given a compelling backstory that is missing from the movie. The ending is shocking and strong.

They Knew

Sarah Kendzior eviscerates U.S. establishment institutions that have failed the public and serve a transnational criminal elite composed of government, business and big media. These bad actors, using an ingenious strategy of creating wild conspiracies that contain a grain of truth, divert attention from the actual dirty dealings that are rotting American democracy. One party is obviously worse, but both are complicit in this culture of impunity. As an example of how this book has opened my eyes like no other in recent memory, I compared the reaction of an establishment type (Michael Bechloss) to the appointment of Jeff Zients as Biden's chief of staff (great choice), to the actual record of Zients as an incompetent COVID czar with a business background that includes demonstrated fraud in medical billing. To think that institutional and establishment players have the public's interest in mind was always, I thought, silly, but Kendzior's dead-serious and sharply written account turns that feeling into grave fear.

Sisters

Daisy Johnson's novel contains some of the worst prose I've read in years. Its artificiality, prententiousness and ham-fistedness are breathtaking. 

Foster

Claire Keegan's short story Foster, sold as a novel like her other short story Small Things Like These, is simple yet manipulative. Tonally, the character of the girl's father shifts drastically from the first pages to the last, making the ending feel cheap.

Playing Under the Piano

Hugh Bonneville's memoir is a bit long-winded on the subject of his childhood, but checks most of the boxes for a successful book of this kind with entertaining anecdotes and name-drops. In addition, Bonneville writes poignantly of his parents, a mother who worked for MI6 and a father who succumbed to dementia. Finally, he has a sly and winning sense of humor that comes through in these pages.

A Woman's Story and Shame

These two short nonfictional novels by Nobel winner Annie Ernaux feature her precise and unblinking excavation of human events and relationships. The first is a cold-blooded look at her mother, who at the beginning of the book has died after suffering from dementia. The second concerns an incident in her childhood – her father threatening to kill her mother – that left psychic scars that persisted into adulthood. The honesty and openness of Ernaux's novels is unlike anything I've ever read.