The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
by Alvaro Mutis
-I can only recommend the first 3 novellas, which I really enjoyed...but considering what came after, I now doubt my reaction to those stories. As the book goes on, the interesting structures and adventure gets dialed way down, and the cliches and fake world-weariness and self-regarding bullshit gets to be too much, and it turns into almost a self-parody. By the end I was rolling my eyes big time! and almost quit reading, but kept with it. Sorry Katie.

(These are the interesting and noteworthy articles and essays I read this month.)

March
(open)

The Last Book Party
Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Invisible Hands
Ken Silverstein

Curtain callsBy Edward Hoagland

Fatal Distraction
by Gene Weingarten
-Overwhelming. Be sure to read to the end.

The Unfinished
by D.T. Max

A Devil Obsessed Conglomeration of Christian Misfits
by William Giraldi

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco

Last Evenings on Earth and By Night in Chile
by Roberto Bolaño

The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce

The Odyssey
Robert Fagles translation

Difficult Loves and Marcovaldo
by Italo Calvino

The New Sun
by Taro Tashima

I'm going to start keeping track of noteworthy articles, essays, and longer blog posts I read on month-by-month basis. I'll add to this entry until Feb. is done.

February

Speaking in Tongues
Zadie Smith

Wow, Fiction Works!
Colson Whitehead

Sick in the Head
Why America won't get the health-care system it needs
Luke Mitchell

The war on telephone poles
By Eula Biss

A brief personal history of altweekly comics in America
Tom Tomorrow

The Dolphin Reader
ed. Douglas Hunt

-This is 1000+ pages, an anthology textbook of essays, 1986 edition. There are several editions of this anthology. From what I can tell by a quick look around the Internet, different editions have sometimes very different content. I think it's pretty great; at times it felt like reading a great issue of a giant magazine--a lot of it is magazine-style writing.

It goes high on 2 of my lists: "Books That Give You a Decent Liberal Education w/o Going to College" and "How To Write."

These were some of the highlights:

"Twins" and "Progress and Change"
by EB White
"Lord Bacon"
by Thomas Babington Macaulay
"On a Greek Holiday"
by Alice Bloom
"Why Paul Fussell Thinks He's Better Than You"
by James Fallows
(The section on "Art and Sport" contained the highest number of essays that I really enjoyed:)
"In the Country"
by Roger Angell (I was surprisingly moved by this, about loving baseball, of all things!)
"Georgia O' Keefe"
by Joan Didion
"Bullfighting"
by Ernest Hemingway
"Art for Art's Sake"
by EM Forster
"Benefit of Clergy"
by George Orwell
"Las Meninas"
by Kenneth Clark
(and...)
"Holy Dying"
by Jeremy Taylor
"Sightseer"
by Walker Percy
"Writing and Typing"
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts"
by William G. Perry

(Left off this list are some classics which "go without saying," like "Civil Disobedience," "Letter from Birmingham Jail" or "Once More to the Lake" etc. Also Jessica Mitford's muckraking journalism makes a couple of inspiring appearances. She is new to me.)

As a service to future generations, I also kept track of what the LAME! essays, which I thought were either written in a weak or annoying style, or full of bad thinking, usually both:

"The Abolition of Man"
by CS Lewis (I have read this essay/book probably 4 or 5 times over the years, and I grow to despise it more and more. Someday I hope to write more about it...)
"Hugh Hefner" and "The Right Stuff"
by Tom Wolfe (These confirmed for me why my spider-sense has told me to avoid Tom Wolfe over the years. I don't like reading the way he writes.)
"The Middle Class"
by Paul Fussell
"In Defense of Snobs"
by William Manchester
"Going Home Again: The New American Scholarship Boy" and "Mr. Secrets"
by Richard Rodriguez (Not really that offensive...just mediocre navel-gazing.)
"The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson"
by Robert Frost
"Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing"
by Phyllis McGinley
"Sunrise with Seamonsters"
by Paul Theroux (I have liked some of his writing in other places, but this was like being told a long anecdote by a person you wouldn't want to hang out with.)
"The Faith"
by David Bradley (skippable memoir)
"No Essays, Please!"
Joseph Wood Krutch (What a name! Not that bad, just particularly skippable.)
"Enlargement of Mind"
by John Henry Newman (This one has some meaty ideas to think about, but Newman is one of THE classic versions of my arch-enemies, the Disingenuous Intellectual Christian Krusader, whose schtick goes something like, "here's an argument showing how I'm right and you're wrong...but by the way, just so you know, also you're going to burn eternally in hell...so there's that to consider as well...")

----
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco

Wolf Whistle and
Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

Savage Detectives (in English), Amulet, and Nazi Literature in the Americas
by Roberto Bolaño

The All Girl Football Team
by Lewis Nordan

State of the Art
by Pauline Kael

Sputnik Sweetheart

South of the Border, West of the Sun

and

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Burma Chronicles
by Guy Delisle

D&Q Showcase #5
-great

Jamilti and other stories
by Rutu Modan

The Explainers (complete Village Voice strips 1956-1966)
by Jules Feiffer

picked up two books on a whim while cruising the Humanities Dept. at the library (they have an awesome fiction selection thanks to Sean P.):

The Adventures of Maqroll: four novellas by Alvaro Mutis (totally blew me away, so I checked out his site on Club Cultura (http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/clubescritores/mutis/) and based on his "recommended titles" started reading "Remembrance of things Past")

and

Wellsprings, essays by Mario Vargas Llosa

which led me to finally read

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (read in White River Junction, VT while visiting the Center for Cartoon Studies)

also while there read

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (borrowed from the Schultz library)

while in San Francisco this past week read

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (I'm counting each part separately in an attempt to read as many books if not more than Kevin)

The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolano
-really great.

Maakies with the Wrinkled Knees
by Tony Millionaire

Little Lulu Vol: 15

A Personal Matter
by Kenzaburo Oe

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami

Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters; and, Seymour, and Introduction
by J.D. Salinger

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
by Vladimir Nabakov

A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf

working through Selected Essays of Montaigne
trans. by Donald Frame

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas Hofstadter

Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas Hofstadter

Little Lulu Vol. 14
by John Stanley and Irving Tripp
(also have read Vol. 1-13)

The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead

Death Note Vols. 4-8

What It Is
by Lynda Barry

Death Note Vols. 1-4
by Tsugumi Ohba

Best Essays 2004
ed. Louis Menand

Bottomless Belly Button
by Dash Shaw

After Dark
by Haruki Murakami

Adventures of Tintin Vol. 4
-I'm reading this for the first time, trying to study the storytelling style and decide what the deal is...and finding the stories really tiresome reading–the coincidences, the lame humor. "Prisoners of the Sun" was particularly awful.

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh by Mo Yan

I picked this up after I read a favorable review (which I only read because I liked the title) of his latest book, "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out." I couldn't get that one right away so this is an older book of his short stories, kind of hit and miss but I really liked the title story ("Shifu etc."), "Man and Beast," and "Abandoned Child." Here's a sample: "Just then, gusts of wind made the coarse sunflower leaves rustle coarsely as they brushed my head and face and, at the same time, rubbed against my pitted heart like sandpaper."

The Wu-Tang Manual
by RZA, etc.

Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace

Sorry, I'm a bit behind:

Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
Trust Me: Short Stories by John Updike
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R.Saks

Scott Pilgrim Vol: 4
by Bryan Lee O' Malley

The Uses of Argument
by Stephen E. Toulmin
(skimmed)

Cat Speak
by Bash Dibra
(skimmed, not recommended)

Melville's Letters in Norton Moby-Dick
and The Indispensible Melville
ed. Jay Leyda

Adventures of Tintin Volume 3
(read it all, finally.)

365 Days: A Diary
by Julie Doucet
(read it all! great drawings.)

Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up. A Woefully Incomplete Guide
by Bob Harris
-The jokes can seem kind of inappropriate, but I admit they're pretty good jokes.

Ready for Anything
by David Allen

Best American Essays 2007
ed. David Foster Wallace

Moby Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
!!!!

Kill All Your Darlings
by Luc Sante

In the Blink of an Eye
by Walter Murch

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
by Ken Jennings
Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking
by Eric Lax

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
and
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I miss Fafblog.
update:
It's back!

The Braindead Megaphone
by George Saunders
Recommended.
(finished this about a week ago)

Born Standing Up
Steve Martin

Estrella Distante and
Nocturno de Chile
by Roberto Bolaño

The Owl Service and
The Stone Book
by Alan Garner

The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud

Essays
by William James
(and this completes the two Library of America volumes of James' Writings)
(really enjoyed this)

Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy
(Family Happiness, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Devil, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, Father Sergius, Hadji Murad, Alyosha the Pot)

Bursting the Limits of Time
by Martin J. S. Rudwick
(History of development of geology as discipline and its slow-dawning "discovery" of the age of the earth. Very highly recommended for anyone interested in evolution/creation or geology or the Enlightenment.)

Sabbath's Theater
by Phillip Roth