Books, 420 Characters (July Round-Up)

The month of July passed with several mini-book reviews not being uploaded to the blog. That doesn't mean I haven't been reading, though - in fact, it was a pretty good month.

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Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine; The History Of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

Mao’s Great Leap Forward is less familiar than the Holocaust or Great Purge, yet as Dikotter insists, Mao was clearly as evil as Hitler or Stalin. The starvation was not accidental, but deliberate, like a death camp. This grim book details how one ruler murdered 45 million citizens in the name of progress. Anybody interested in the dangers of collectivist thinking should put down Ayn Rand and pick up this account.

Tristan Garcia, Hate: A Romance

French fiction often incorporates politics without seeming didactic, unlike similar attempts by American authors, which maybe says something about the cultural benefits of not consigning politics to the sidelines, or maybe just highlights American tendencies towards didacticism. A philosophical novel of AIDS in Paris, the 1990s, shifting sands on the intellectual beach, and good plain love and hate.

Randall Jarrell, Pictures From An Institution

Sole novel from a poet whose own work often seemed uneasy with the modern world – but less a novel than a brilliant, sustained parade of epigrams. A thinly disguised Sarah Lawrence becomes “Benton College,” and a cast of campus characters jockey and hustle for position in prose that will have even seasoned readers reaching for the dictionary. Higher education has rarely been savaged so knowingly.

David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself; A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace

One interpretation – decade-old conversations literally transcribed and rushed to publication in the aftermath of tragic suicide. Another, more generous, interpretation – rare fly-on-wall opportunity to sit in with a young author circa 1996 as he muses on matters ranging from Pauline Kael and Heidegger to his own discomfiting brush with fame. Always the smartest guy in the room, Wallace – and often the kindest, too.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Unfinished when Wallace ended his life, the 500+ pages of this novel about IRS agents assume an eerie completion, due to fragmented characters seen through the unforgiving lens of itemized deductions. But in essence this novel is emotional and political – emotional in the way dead-end lives are painted with sympathy, political in that Wallace suggests those able to withstand boredom will help carry us to our doom.