Great list. I'd add an Alice Munro story. There are many candidates but my first choice would be "Progress of Love."

Started Star Wars: Aftermath. So far it's been fun going back to Star Wars land. I kind of like that they decided to remove most of the Star Wars Universe out of continuity (even if that means that over 20 books I read "don't count"). It should be fun to have a cleaner slate for stories to move forward.

In regards to Alice Munro I greatly appreciated her semi-autobiographical View from Castle Rock...also a few random stories in The New Yorker. A great writer

The author, Chuck Wendig, has a really good blog about writing called terribleminds.

A former student, now a journalist, just sent me this quotation from George Saunders' recent New Yorker piece, "My Writing Education: A Timeline,"

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...ion-a-timeline

I guess I mean the serial nature of the series, revisiting the same character over and over a decade apart, and then the pop-culture, slice of life content of the books themselves, i.e. you could easily see Rabbit Redux as a treatise on the Civil Rights movement and counter-culture nature of the transition to the 60s, you could easily see Rabbit is Rich as a treatise on the materialism of the 80s, etc.

excellent piece.

The Easy Rawlins detective novels by Walter Mosley, starting with "Devil in a Blue Dress" set in the black part of 1940s LA. There's 2 books set in the 50s and multiple in the 60s. They deal a lot with racial and social issues, as well as the changes LA is going through.

I finished the sword and sorcery book Theft of Swords by Michael Sullivan. It's two self-published books combined into one. I liked the first story a lot, and the second one dragged a bit early but finished off nicely. Pretty good heroes but the villains were underwhelming. Plot of the second story was contrived but not terrible. Good action sequences (though not enough of them), and I liked the setting, but the books have some pacing problems. Not bad overall. I'm not sure whether I'll continue the series... we'll see.

I am trying My Struggle (Knausgard, not Hitler) and it's a struggle. Gonna stick with it but I've gone to Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts on the side and it's getting much more of my attention at the moment.

I found this piece by Tim Parks, about how some love and some hate the same books, quite interesting. He's a Knasgaard dissenter. (He also comes down hard on Ferrante.)

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog...ike-that-book/

Thanks.

Yeah this article pretty much nailed it. I think it's good, but do i really think it's great enough that I know 5.5+ books of this is ahead of me?

The article asks two very interesting questions: What is good writing? Why do people like bad writing?

I was disappointed by the author's cop-out conclusion. "Perhaps THE function of fiction is to demonstrate that people read differently. We must be honest, REALLY honest, with each other about what we like and why." Really?? I think the problem is trying to attack these big questions in such a short article.

Agreed. I thought the most interesting point he made was to differentiate between fiction we read for the plot (and how we read it) and the fiction we read for reasons other than the plot.

Maybe it's the beer talking, but it struck me as 2000 words with a slight air of condescension concluding that people have different tastes in literature. I'm not sure that it really told me anything.

Also, I would quibble a bit with the sharp distinction between books we read for plot and books we read for other reasons. I think i would rather say that we can read just for plot or we can read for other reasons. To put it another way, for me literature, capital l, is not a genre, it's a way of reading. Some books might be more rewarding to read as literature, but equally what is regarded as literary and what is not is neither fixed not agreed upon and I think there's a rich vein of books in between the two categories he gives.

Ha, it is interesting in my procrastination over writing an analysis of W.G. Sebald that he appears in an article that had the purpose of taking my mind off of writing about Sebald.

What distinguishes great novels from the good, the bad and the ugly is not only style, which is often a marker, but also what is actually at stake. Coetzee's style is brilliantly minimalist. It takes a special kind of mastery of language to write that bare, stripped down style and do it well. And that is a significant distinction that Coetzee has over a lot of other good writers but there is much more to distinguish him. Whilst I cannot speak directly on Disgrace (it is sitting on my desk waiting for me to finish my research essay), however I have critically read Michael K and Summertime and so I feel I have some basis for interpreting him. What marks Coetzee as great is that within that style, there are dense discourses on a wide range of literary, philosophical and , perhaps most importantly, ethical topics. Each and every element of his narrative structure is speaking toward and sometimes against long-standing debates. He certainly does engage with some weighty literary theory but he does so using multi-valent narrative devices. My advice to the imagined debaters in that piece would be to consider what ethical question is Coetzee asking of you when he draws strange moral equivalencies rather than just superimposing your own pre-existing moral system upon the text. Because, if there is anything that marks great writers and their text apart, is that they challenge us to think of the world in a different way.

David Markson's The Last Novel is relevant to the discussion of judging art

I love Gaitskill's work. She's a great stylist and one of the best short story writers in the world.

She sure is. I have a Munro volume lying around here also.

Saunders still confirmed GOAT:

'If I had my way I'd move everybody to Canada. It's nice there. Very polite. We went for a weekend last fall and got a flat tire and these two farmers with bright-red faces insisted on fixing it, then springing for dinner, then starting a college fund for the babies. They sent us the stock certificates a week later along with a photo of all of us eating cobbler at a diner.'

Two I polished off:

The second book of Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, The Guns of Avalon. Zelazny's style is... odd. His prose is equal parts high speech and seventies faux tough guy. And then he'll blend in these beautiful pastoral descriptions along the way. After two books I'm getting used to it, but it's still strange to have a main character who will one moment say something like, "Whatever, I'd cream that guy in a fistfight," and the next break out in a speech (almost) worthy of Othello.

That being said, I'm really enjoying the story overall. I love how Amber is the only real world and all the rest are shadows. And the methods characters use to travel back and forth through realms are all awesome: the Pattern, the Trumps, Dworik's pictures, and thinking through worlds -- all are cool and unique. Somebody above mentioned the Shakespearen references, and those are great, but I've also been enjoying the abundance of Arthurian parallels, too.

Also, I listened to Bernard Cornwell's account of Waterloo, read by Dugald Bruce Lockhart. Excellent book, even if it is a lot to absorb in audio format. Lockhart races through the material, and there are a ton of things to keep track of, but Cornwell does something I always appreciate when dealing with complicated material, and that is to give a quick callback to a distinguishing feature, as in, "Louis Soandso, who ate gunpowder for breakfast...." It really makes the material easier to digest. Lots of drama here, and great straightforward prose. Cornwell also does well to pay attention to differing accounts of the same occurrence, mentioning on more than one occasion that war is an indescribable event.

Adam Johnson's new book of stories just won the National Book Award.

Interesting. One of my favorites.

What kind of art? Useful for Degas little dancer? For that interesting tangle of kelp that I recently observed on the beach. A black bowler hat with a purple violet stuck in the top peaking out at the world like an eye with beautiful distain? Inquiring minds need to know?

Sebald's Rings of Saturn bimedial text explicitly engages with art's intersection with Literature in the narrator's interpretation of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson.



It is within the first part of the novel and is an interesting take on the irony within this picture that Rembrandt inserts.

There are a number of elements that are noted - I wonder if you can guess what they are?