my favorite books I read in 2020
Norah Lange's People in the Room -- writing is like anything else creative in terms of it works best if the imagination is being implemented and the kind of killer combo is if you put some thought into your imagination. so Norah Lange out-of-the-parks it and Borges wrote the introduction to her first poetry book, she was a member of the Argentinian avant-garde intellectuals and a sort of dirty secret or like anyway something that's known but not much talked about is how women better understand what it feels like being human
Milan Kundera's Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead and Yuko Tsushima's Of Dogs and Walls and Clarice Lispector's Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady -- these are actually short stories put in book form and I fucking love short books
The Golden Ass by Apuleius -- it's genuinely "the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety" and it's about a guy who is turned into a donkey and jacked shit happens the entire book while he acts casual about it he is so yolo honestly the entire Roman Empire was mad fucking yolo like don't sweat it have you read Cicero's On Living and Dying Well I mean that's just a title they gave it but it matches
Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown -- I hyped this to you guys before it won the national book award and Roxane gay was the head juror so ~yet again~ I know what I'm talking about nah but yeah that's true but the whole thing here is about a life that exists outside what's expected and in a racial context it's applied to being outside the white v black narrative that is heavily pronounced in the usa but he does that behind-the-scenes to this book that's formatted like.a screenplay it's cool the new cool is form
Tove Jansson's Fair Play -- you know I'm like okay I want to write about my life too ughck okay okay so this is an example of a way it's done in which people like it I'm taking notes oh it's good, nice
Omensetter's Luck by William Gass -- DFW put it on his favorites list and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and The Tunnel I've done so this was a natural evolution and so okay the whole thing is that once you really get into literature the way you've gotten into cinema you see that literature is basically exactly the same as cinema except your shots are your prose and anyway Gass knew that and there's some literary this/that until he fucking shreds it at the end
Willa Cather's The Professor's House -- suicide is still a bad ending but now I've not only read Cather I've read this particular one that is a certain type of book
Roberto Bolańo's By Night in Chile -- oh god it's one of his most celebrated in fact potentially the most celebrated and it's a novella okay I'm there I love it
Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas -- oh it's that thing in which I like a thing that not everybody likes and I think it's obviously great but that's not unanimously believed and just this time it's a book instead of a movie, I get it, that's vaguely funny
László Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming -- it's a big fucking book by a contemporary topshelfer and I read it during the plague it was dope