Read 50 books in 2005

Ooh, I’m getting so far behind on this goal. So, as I’m working my way through a dense but wonderful book about Edward Muybridge (River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit), I thought I’d take some detours into quicker reads.

This play by Don DeLillo is still pretty dense, though, but I really loved parts of it. It’s nominally about a man who sets out on a business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana and ends up in Valparaiso, Chile. But it’s mostly about place and placelessness, the disconnectedness and obsessiveness of contemporary media, and a host of other things.

The ending I found unsatisfying, but endings are hard, and there’s lots of good, rich, weird stuff before you get there. Best phrase: “eggwhitely nuance.”

This is a quick read and really fascinating. For those who live in the NY/NJ area, it’s almost like a dare: this guy actually took a kayak into the Meadowlands! And saw someone swimming in it!

This was delightful, hilarious and deeply sad all at the same time. (“I laughed, I cried!”). Mostly laughed, though. It is a re-envisioning of the P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster format with the irrepressible Bertie Wooster replaced by Alan Blair, an equally irrepressible (but also depressive and neurotic) New York jewish writer. Wodehouse fans should not miss this, especially if they share any of our new hero’s traits.

I just finished Jonathan Lethem’s recent novel, and found it deeply moving and richly fascinating. I loved it despite the fact that it felt gimmicky in a few places (not many), and despite a worrisome sense that it is so widely praised in part because of how it plays the protagonist’s white guilt off of the author’s white guilt, off of the white guilt of me and most of the other white readers.