A few summer reads near the end of summer.

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Interpreter of Maladies - Polished New Yorker Short Stories (it’s a genre) nothing more or less, won acclaim for slightly boring, slightly engaging professionally sandpapered stories of the highly-educated multi-cultural urban bourgeois. The stories in her debut are arranged in chronological order, and you can tell as the stories steadily increase in quality, but it’s not until the final entry that I found a genuinely engaging, memorable one.

Larry Brown - Facing the Music - Well-edited minimalist stories in a Raymond Carver vein in the Mid-American MFA Workshop genre. This was issued in 1985 so points for pioneering the sort of stories I read every MFA student crank out in the ’90s. Blue Collar Blues of losers in burnt out rust belt towns who cheat, drink to much, and sometimes get violent. K-Mart Fiction they called it in the 80s but there ain’t no K-Marts no more.

Donald Ray Pollock - The Devil All the Time - Southern Gothic Horror is a well-worn genre by now and there’s nothing here that Flannery O’Connor or Faulkner didn’t do better, but it’s engagingly plot-driven. The characters are all good ol’ perverted hillbilly stereotypes straight of Deliverance. Lots of murder, pedophilia, suicide, crazy religious nutters, psychopaths roaming the highways picking up hitchhikers, that sort of thing. Read it if you like scary movies.

Donald E. Westlake - The Hot Rock - Fun ’60s jewel heist romp from one of the classic noir masters. Slim and highly amusing. Did they ever make a Steve McQueen flick out of this? Sounds up his alley and reads like a film script.

Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists - Reporters for a third-rate English language paper in Italy during the Bush II era. Another fun lightweight read - very funny. Currently right in the middle of this. I’ll be checking out the other novel he has out - I’m really liking this so far. Reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930s novel Scoop.

…

Audiobooks:

Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire - Abbey was a park ranger in Utah and this book, released in the early ‘70s, is considered a classic of early environmentalism. Ed comes across as a cranky old cowboy who hearkens back to the good old days because he hates modern civilization with an intensely passionate fervor. His descriptions of the majestic beauty of the desert landscape are moving - he cares much more about nature than people, that’s obvious. His ideal lifestyle is summering as a hermit in the wild and wintering a decadent city of sin like Frisco or Denver with whores and whiskey. Ah, the cowboy life! He goes off on extended proto-Libertarian rants about fat tourists in cars too lazy to get out and walk (some even in wheelchairs!) ruining his little spot of paradise. And the goddamn gubmint (despite, being, y’know, a government employee). But he’s a highly educated man despite his rough, misanthropic backwoodsman exterior - he muses on which classical composers would best suit which landscapes and name-drops philosophers with casual ease. I guess the education system was just better in them ol’ days.

Katherine Boo - Behind the Beautiful Flowers - Life amongst the garbage scavengers in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. Human existence doesn’t get lower or more degraded on a daily level than this, but somehow the families survive (sometimes). Told in a series of short story anecdotes, this is a depressing, effective piece of human interest reportage, but the narrator’s reading of the characters’ cartoonish Indian accents is highly distracting. I laughed a few times when I really shouldn’t have because it.

Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential - Don’t bother reading this. It has to be listened to in Tony’s own voice. Before he got his TV show, he and every crew he worked with lived the motto, “Work hard, party hard,” to the max cranked to 11. Makes working as a fry cook in a dead-end job at the greasy spoon seem almost… glamorous (!!!). (Trust me, it’s not.) Work like a Marine by night and party like a rock star later at night. Do enough coke to qualify as a Fleetwood Mac roadie. Fuckkkk yeahhhh!!! (Warning: listening to this is NSFW.)

Sally Rooney - Normal People - Irish Chick Lit. This is OK. A couple of hours in, 5 more to go.