Saint Mudd - Steve Thayer

An old-fashioned novel of gangsters, newspapermen, whores, cops, and children. The story takes place in St. Paul, Minnesota during the Great Depression as prohibition is coming to an end. The city is overrun with lawlessness and crooked police. Part mystery, it is also a remembrance of the city's by-gone time. The details pop and invoke the streets, the hills, and the river.

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

A strange and difficult to categorize, sometimes fantastic work of a world unlike our own. Titus Groan takes places in the land of Gormenghast, a land that Peake has conjured whole-cloth. It feels at once alien and familiar. The work is populated with characters simultaneously medieval and modern. It reads like a fable and study of palace intrigue. Accessible on the first reading, I anticipate revisiting Flay and Rottcodd, Swelter and Lord Sepulchrave.

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

"He could think of no reason for the transponder sending unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that."

This time through I was struck by the subtlety of Chigurh's mind and the falling-away of Bell. One of the terrifying things about Chigurh is the clarity of thought, and subsequent action, he seems to demonstrate. Rarely is he tripped-up or caught off-guard. This gives him an apparent single purpose to his actions. Bell, as he admits time and again, feels overmatched by what is coming. Ellis tells him that cannot be stopped, that you cannot get back what was lost. Bell's self-described story is one of failure. As narrator he may hold that the country has changed. Ellis suggests it has not. Its always been hard on people. We are left wondering if Bell, who seemed to model himself after his grandfather, would not have been better off paying closer heed to his father's example - who we hear little about. Perhaps. There are no clear answers.

"I knew he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there is all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

Continuing my march through McCarthy's works. Suttree is surely the funniest of those I have yet read. In particular Harrogate's antics stand out - he bears similarities to Jimmy Blevins from All the Pretty Horses. Whether he is cadging change from payphones, dynamiting his way into a bank vault, or causing a small-scale prison riot, Harrogate brings a lightness and foolishness to Suttree's life which may be a tad self-important. McCarthy captures the mood of the river and the people who inhabit the margins of Knoxville. The characters come fully-formed, at once real and absurd. In this earlier work it feels like McCarthy is piloting techniques that are honed and refined in, for example, Blood Meridian and The Crossing. The book reads as episodic and its a bit unclear how each event contributes to a changing Suttree. But maybe that is the point, as a raft drifts in the river, so does Suttree drift. One of McCarthy's most enjoyable.

The Godfather - Mario Puzo

Re-read Puzo's classic as a light holiday diversion. In particular the rise of both Vito and Michael reads as a parallel. I was unclear why there was such an emphasis on Johnny Fontane's story. Enjoyable.

Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy

The circumstances we are born into are beyond our control. While human life issues from a darkness, for some the world itself is a type of outer dark. What narrative we create out of our lives is of our own making - largely meaningless. McCarthy's story, resembling a parable, ends with a road that leads nowhere, save a tangled way.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

This time through, the story strikes me for its unity of journeys: how the narrator's intellectual journey is mirrored and given color by the landscape he moves through, by the experiences between he and Chris, by the way concepts are unified with the person. So landscape (of the world and mind), concepts, and interpersonal relationships merge into a story of the person. Perhaps that is meant to be Pirsig's synthesis. I have read the work enough that it serves as a reminder and cause for reflection on how I have changed. It remains an aspirational work to engender a hoped-for unity of work, person, and understanding. That such a path is useful, and such an outcome possible, is comforting.

From a 1974 interview with Pirsig, "The goal is just to live your life without too much fuss about it."