Book report for August 2023

This was not supposed to be the next communiqué from my joggled mind. But an essay on politicians raising their fists momentarily stalled out. (Note how the scribbler omitted all pronouns to absolve himself of any responsibility for this lack of production.) That one remains in the queue and should be in your hands by week’s end. Maybe. Meanwhile—an accounting of Dr Essai’s literary consumption for the month just past. (Booklinks take you to Dr Essai’s shop on Bookshop.org. Every book purchased from such an affiliate link puts a few bucks in the account of independent booksellers, and a few nickels in my pocket. Yes, it’s a kickback scheme, but a benign one.)

Completed

• Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle. Clear consideration of Henry David Thoreau’s thinking and writing about work, and a refutation of the stupid notion that Thoreau can be dismissed as a dreamy layabout.
• The Living, Annie Dillard. A tremendous novel. Dense, and requires the reader’s full attention, which meant I was not always in the mood, but that attention was rewarded by one superb sentence after another. Dillard wrote only two novels; this one is a beauty.
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov. Terrible. I loved the Foundation novels when I was a kid. Revisiting this volume was dispiriting. Asimov was a lousy writer. If you’re curious why science fiction has so often been derided and scorned, Foundation displays all of the genre’s faults: ludicrous expository dialog, cardboard characters, predictable plotting, no psychological or historical insight. I meant to reread the whole trilogy, but life’s too short.

• Open Throat, Henry Hoke. It takes about three hours to read, and that will be the damnedest three hours. An audacious sliver of a novel set in Los Angeles and narrated by a mountain lion. Seriously. It will stay with you.

In progress

• Reading: A Very Short Introduction, Belinda Jack
• The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer, William Howarth
• Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Under consideration

• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, Stewart Brand
• By the Numbers, James Richardson
• Tune In, Vol. 1: The Beatles: All These Years, Mark Lewisohn
• Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, John Szwed
• The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, Prudence Peiffer
• Search Party: Collected Poems, William Matthews
• The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit
• A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Frank Wilczek

Purchased

• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Open Throat, Henry Hoke
• Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher
• Against Amazon and Other Essays, Jorge Carrión
• Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, Peter Brooks
• A Horse at Night: On Writing, Amina Cain
• Devotion, Patti Smith

Abandoned

• Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul