Here’s what I read over my vacation. It would have been twelve books, but I’m still reading The Orange Eats Creeps, but it’s okay since that book’s like prose no-wave. I sometimes kick myself for not putting up more content here, but other than a weekly writing status report, which I suspect no one wants to read, I can’t think of anything to write for regular content. So monthly book reports it is.

The Drowning Girl – Caitlin R. Kiernan (2012): An impressionistic ghost story that might not be a ghost story, but more along the lines of a Blackwood story where someone encounters something and the something is unfathomable. Here we have a schizophrenic young woman encountering the unknown in the person of another woman, who may be a ghost, or a mermaid, or a wolf dressed in the skin of a girl. Atmospheric and weird in the best way.

Smonk – Tom Franklin (2006): Violent over the top Southern-fried Western populated by mutant cartoon characters armed with guns and high explosives. If you like your violence tobacco-splattered and foul-mouthed, you’ll probably like this.

The Dinner – Herman Koch (2013): Two brothers and their wives get together for dinner and attempt to come to terms with the fact that their sons committed a horrible crime that’s been caught on camera and broadcast around the nation. As the man-hunt remains ongoing each family prepares to do all it can to protect itself, including murder. A somewhat enjoyable book with an unreliable narrator, but I couldn’t help but feel that Koch required pages to tell you what Simenon would only have needed a paragraph and a few ellipses to do.

Missing out: In Praise of the Unlived Life – Adam Phillips (2012): One problem I have with nonfiction is that too often it reads like it would have made for a better article than a book, and that’s the case here. Some nice nuggets buried throughout such as: “We know more about the experiences we haven’t had than about the experiences we have had.” And Phillips then goes on to critique this omniscience and poke holes in it, but often I found the conclusions drowned beneath the erudition.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism – bell hooks (1995): Essays and analysis on racism in America. A counter-point to the Terkel book I read last month. I started it right after that book, but its density slowed me down and I ended up reading it a bit at a time week by week. I’ve recommended it to friends since then. Most people should read this.

Junky – William S. Burroughs (1953): I forgot how great this book was. Yeah. Burroughs was a criminal psychopath. There’s no denying that. But when writing white-hot, as he is here, his prose throws sparks off the page.

Resume with Monsters – William Browning Spencer (1995): Protag works a series of dead-end jobs while trying to get back together with the woman who left him (for good reason) and battle Cthulhu and assorted other Old Ones hiding out behind the facade of corporate America. If you’ve ever worked a shit job and had to suffer through horrible HR presentations than you’ll be simpatico to this book.

The End of Everything – Megan Abbott (2011): This was an amazing book, part detective, part coming of age novel, all riveting, creepy, and startling. A girl’s best friend is kidnapped the summer before they’re both set to begin high school, and sets in motion events that can only lead to an end of innocence and childhood. The brilliant thing in this book is the way the jaded PI trope gets upended by a girl playing detective who’s a complete innocent encountering a wider world of adulthood mystery.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself – Young-Ha Kim (2007): A Korean novel from the mid-90s where all the women exist to commit suicide and the guys make art and dream about cars. I don’t know what to make of this book. It’s narrator is a bit Holden Caulfield-esque – if Holden was a serial killer going around Seoul convincing alienated twenty-somethings to kill themselves. And that’s what the novel sort of exudes and revels in: twenty-somethingness that mistakes a shallow morbid lack of empathy for profundity.

Storm Kings – Lee Sandlin (2013): Two-fisted tales of meteorology! This is a fascinating account of the oft-contentious history of American meteorology and storm chasing from the Colonial Era (Ben Franklin and his kite) to the modern day. The chapter titled “The Finger of God” is worth reading, even if it’s just in the bookstore.

Jack Glass – Adam Roberts (2012): Fantomas of the spaceways that sometimes downgrades to fan fiction for equations. I preferred the former more than the latter.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence – Jack Womack (1993): The Diary of Anne Frank meets Clockwork Orange by way of Gossip Girl set in a dystopian USA that looks more familiar than it should. At the end you either feel sad for Lola, its protagonist, or glad that she’s adapted to her changing environment. Worth tracking down.

I wanted to make July all about reading nonfiction, but that didn’t happen. Some fiction squeaked in. Plus I started more books than I finished, because nonfiction, so now I’m reading nonfiction in between and around fiction. An essay here, an essay there.

On a similar note, August was supposed to be all about Epic Fantasy but I picked up the first 700+ page book in the pile and cracked; my resolve fled and I said, “Fuck no!” Instead August is going to be all about stand alone genre novels. That’s what I’m writing, so that’s what I’m reading. Fuck Epic Fantasy.

On to the books:

Race: How Blacks and Whites Think And Feel About The American Obsession by Studs Terkel.

I can’t believe I hadn’t read Terkel until now. This book was great. I feel like Terkel should be our (USian) default historian, like most citizens should read his stuff and be familiar with it even if you don’t agree with it. And there’s lots here. The whole book is interviews about race relations in and around Chicago from the 50s on into the 80s. A document of lives lived through the death of Emmett Till, the housing protests, Affirmative Action, the closing of the steel mills, and the rise of the Nation of Islam. Like I said, agree or disagree with the speakers here but at least have the conversation to happen. Here’s the quote the book ends on from a mixed race man named Leo:

“I have faith we can mature. Stranger things have happened. Maybe America, maybe the world is in its adolescence. Maybe we’re driving home from the prom, drunk, and nobody knows whether we’re going to survive or not. Maybe we’ll survive and maybe we’ll be a pretty smart old person, well-adjusted and mellow.”

The Star Thrower – Loren Eiseley

I did blather some about Eiseley before and this book is as good as any other to jump into his stuff with. The titular essay is probably his most famous. It’s about encountering a man on a beach that throws dying star fishes back into the sea. But the essay I loved was called “How Natural is ‘Natural’?”. That one read like pure Arthur Machen mixed with Edward Abbey or Henry Thoreau.

“I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. I, the professor, trembling absurdly on the platform with my book and spectacles, am the single philosophical animal. I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light.

I have said this is not an illusion. It is when one sees in this manner, or a sense of strangeness halts one on a busy street to verify the appearance of one’s fellows, that one knows a terrible new sense has opened a faint crack in the absolute.”

Cosmic vastnesses indeed!

Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo – Miyuki Miyabe

So, yeah. This book was why I didn’t finish more nonfiction this month. I was part way through bell hooks’s Killing Rage and Adam Phillips’s Missing Out when this book came along in the mail and I said, oh hey, let me read one of these stories and see what they’re all about. And that led to me reading another one and another one and another one.

These stories are pretty damn f’n great y’all.

Okay, so the only other Japanese ghost stories I’ve read are by Lafcadio Hearn and his wife Koizumi Setsu (and when people talk about Hearn’s Japanese work I think they should mention how it was a team effort between him and his wife), and also the work of Edogawa Rampo.

Miyabe’s are different from both of those.

Hearn and Setsu’s were all about the Japaneseness of the stories, because Hearn’s readers wanted exoticism. Rampo’s work took Poe and the conte cruel and mashed them up with their Japanese equivalents to give you such creep fests as “The Human Chair” and other nutty stuff.

In comparison to those Miyabe’s stories are more grounded in the everyday and mundane. They’re all about the marketplace and the ties of association between merchants in 18th and 19th centuries Edo. Each involves either an apprentice or bonded servant entering a situation where they encounter a ghost or demon. Their stories are intersecting other stories and that sense of indebtedness from one person to another is carried over between the living and the dead. Yeah, there’s nothing here that’s going to make me have to get off a crowded train like reading Rampo’s “The Caterpillar” did, but that’s not a bad thing. For a collision of the mundane and the fantastic these stories are perfect. Check them out.