I binged most of his major works one year, and I can’t remember which year–like, 2010, maybe? It’s been a long time.

First off, from the article you posted:

“The 2000s was an era with a certain showy yet wan style in literature. David Mitchell had bumbled onto the world stage with his egregious Cloud Atlas. The Big Writers with Big Initials — George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling — were pumping out their wearisome commercial blockbusters. David Sedaris was eking out a drearily comic thing seemingly every year. James Wood had coined the phrase “hysterical realism,” which correctly diagnosed a certain quality of prolific and anxious postmodern melodrama in then-popular novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Junot Diaz and David Foster Wallace. The barely beating heart of American poetry, gluttonized upon the empty calories of flarf, was being bashed to death by carnival-barking anti-poets Dorothea Lasky and Kenneth Goldsmith. In nonfiction, the period was profusely Gladwellian, chockablock with lightly researched volumes that claimed to easily explain world phenomena. Every other person seemed to be carrying around a copy of Freakonomics. The only books that could have been considered popular foreign lit were two memoir-travelogues written in English, Shantaram and Eat, Pray, Love, stories that cozily revealed to bourgeois fans of the midlist the soul-awakening potential of global tourism.”

Ooof, did read this make me feel old. The way he talks about it like it was a long time ago. But it was.

The Adventures Of Augie March: Most reviews of this that I could find back in the day, be they positive (TIME) or negative (Brothers Judd) said the same thing: the book has a stunning panorama to it, but that you won’t remember it very much when it’s over or care very much about the people in it. And, indeed, I remember being sort of impressed, but also I can remember very little of this book, except for the “birds” motif. Needs a re-read, really. Hell, all of these do.

Seize The Day: I wanted to start with this because I wanted to try something short before something more difficult like Augie March. This felt a bit blunt, but I suppose it was not bad at playing off the part of you that feels like a complete loser and failure. Or at least that’s what Jon Walter told me when I posted my original review on an earlier form of Babble, I remember that much.

Henderson The Rain King: This was his highest ranking novel on that hoary old Modern Library Top 100 of the 20th Century list. I wasn’t terribly sure what was so great about it at all and have forgotten pretty much the entirety of it.

Herzog: I seem to recall this as being a pretty good “divorce” novel coupled with a “Jewish intellectual” novel…but the details have, again, alas, eluded my memory. This and Augie March made TIME’s 100 best list (1923-2005.)

Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Oh, I remember the black pickpocket scene alright. Hard to forget something that needling. But again, the rest of it I’ve forgotten, another Jewish-intellectual novel, but made during hippie times, wasn’t it? With campus revolutionaries hating the proud old intellectual? Has any book from the 1960s onward dealing with this sort of subject NOT done this? (regardless of the writer’s own politics!)

Humboldt’s Gift: He won a big Pulitzer award for this book, but all I remember about the book (I can’t even remember if I liked it or not) was that part of it is set in a theater. Seriously, I’m sorry to embarrass you with my forgetfulness but I barely remember anything about this book at all and had to look up plot details in Wikipedia. Badly needs a re-read. Hell, off the top of my head I had to look up pics of Bellow to know what he even looked like. I mean, Philip Roth, I know what HE looks like!

Ravelstein: Now this book I really liked through and through, my favorite of his books, and I can remember a great deal of it from memory. He wrote it in his 80s and it’s a fictionalization of Bellow’s relationship with Allan Bloom, an asshole figure I found fascinating for similar reasons as why I found Tom Wolfe fascinating (i.e., he was a figure that liberals had to often and grudgingly admit a sort of respect for even though he bashed them a lot of the time). It also outed Bloom as being privately gay, ten years or so after the guy’s death, and a hugely controversial point not just because Bloom died of AIDS, but also because one of Bloom’s big targets in Closing Of The American Mind was college identity politics (as well as bashing androgynous MTV pop stars of the 1980s, which is all in the first 100 pages of the book and is what made the book such a bestseller–and of course, AFTER those first 100 pages is Bellow’s endless discourse on Max Weber and the history of Western philosophy right up to the empty postmodern mess of 1980s culture, which people don’t talk about not simply because it’s not as juicy as hearing some professor bash Mick Jagger–remember that?–and Boy George, et al., but because it goes on forever and puts people completely to fucking sleep in and of itself.) Whatever, a great book, and I’ll never forget the part where the narrator talks about Ravelstein (Bloom) “curing” his friends of their taste of rock by buying loads of opera on CD.