ROCK SALT PAPER CHASER

Stacking

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I delight in a stack of books, and can fool myself into thinking I know what I'll want to read next. In this stack:

  1. Moving On - Larry McMurtry - A shambling rodeo and grad school soap opera about a young woman navigating marriage, relationships, and young adulthood in the 1960s. I'm almost done reading this - at its best, it captures a Linklater-y hangout feeling with wonderful characters (and it is astonishing to read about people untethered from their phones reading paperbacks at the drug store). McMurtry is great at weaving different perspectives, navigating the spaces between relationships, and creating a big moment when you least expect. At its worst, it becomes a bit too idle, and may test your patience.
  2. Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson - I typically lean towards alcoholic detectives for my genre fare, but will attempt to get over my inner snob and admit that I am reading a fantasy book. I dipped my toes into the water here when the plotless nature of Moving On was getting to me, and in 60 pages there were cloaked figures with silly names massacring soldiers with giant dogs, and it appears there is about to be a fight with the moon! Why not.
  3. The Portable Faulkner - William Faulkner - An anthology book that rearranges the Faulkner oeuvre into a chronological account of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. I did read a passage of this about the formation of a town that was exhilarating in it's account of an untamed wilderness.
  4. A Bended Circuity - Robert S. Stickley - you can only order this book direct from its publisher, Corona/Samizdat, who by all accounts is a lone American eccentric living in Slovenia who publishes experimental literature. He slips free books into your order. The kind of knotty, dense, and post-modern shit I sometimes like to read.
  5. Your Name Here by Helen deWitt & Ilya Gridneff - deWitt wrote The Last Samurai, a cult classic that I beseech you to read. Her writing is exquisite and playful, and in the Last Samurai in particular, you can feel the fun she is having while stunting on us all.
  6. The Garden of Seven Twighlights - Miguel de Palol - "A Borgesian, apocalyptic Decameron that begins in a bombed out Barcelona." People trapped in a mansion during a nuclear fallout tell each other stories for 800 pages. Very aesthetically pleasing book-as-object. Have had it tapped as a summer read for a few years now but have never gotten around to it.