This Thing (Still) Don’t Lead to Heaven

Well, after a lot of painstaking research and a lot of fun buying books on Amazon, ebay, abebooks and Better World Books, I’ve managed to collect  20 out of a possible 21 books by or about Harry Crews, excluding minor publications such as Two, Madonna at Ringside and The Enthusiast. I even managed to source a copy of Naked in Garden Hills, which is jetting its way from the UK to my doorstep as we speak.

But I still can’t find a copy of This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven for less than $160 on abebooks and over $400 on ebay! It’s literally $160 Australian dollars for an ex-library copy. Damn. I can’t pay that; it’d break my heart to pay such a figure for one lousy book when I could get the Library of America box set of Philip K Dick’s novels for just under $100 from Amazon. So if you’re reading this out in internetland and you’ve got a copy of This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven lying around that you don’t desperately want to keep, as unlikely as this is, please get in touch.

It looks like this:

Book Review – The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews

First published in 1988, The Knockout Artist is Harry Crew’s tenth novel and the second after his decade-long hiatus. This one couldn’t be any more different to its predecessor All We Need of Hell in terms of tone, however. Where Hell is breezy and amusing, Knockout is serious and grimly told. There’s no trace of a smile here.

The Knockout Artist is the story of Eugene Biggs , former boxer from South Georgia but currently living and working in New Orleans. His boxing career having ended in failure, Biggs is now employed as a novelty act for rich and decadent patrons. His trick? He can knock himself out with a single blow to the jaw. Early in the story, we are introduced to Biggs’ friend Pete and his girlfriend Tulip, who turns out to be a drug-addict. Biggs himself is seeing a PhD candidate by the name of Charity, yet another one of Crews’ femme fatales.

The relationship between Eugene and Charity is based on the fact that Charity is doing her PhD on the former boxer. Eugene doesn’t like to think too much about this–he doesn’t like to think too much about anything–but as the story progresses he becomes uneasy about what exactly his girlfriend has in store for him. This was probably the most intriguing aspect of the book. Another strength is that the novel itself is told in a curiously flat and deadpan style that fits well with Eugene’s state of mind. There’s no adornment to the words on the page at all.

Somewhat less defined, however, is the role of the shadowy and kinky Mr Blasingame, aka Oyster Boy, who ends up making Eugene and Pete an offer they can’t refuse. Then there’s the fact that Tulip is apparently addicted to drugs, something that Eugene isn’t happy about. Eventually Eugene and Pete end up managing a young boxer by the name of Jacques. I felt that this part of the narrative started too late in the story (after page 200 of 270) and that in the end, the narrative ended in violence where it probably didn’t need to. This is a shame, as the first two thirds of the narrative was very strong. It’s like Crews threw too many balls in the air; as he wasn’t sure how he was going to catch them, he just grabbed the main characters and had them exit stage right on the last page.

There’s more too it than that, of course. This is a substantial book and I feel I haven’t done it justice here, but if I’m a little disappointed by the final stanza, it’s only because I felt the rest of The Knockout Artist to be top notch.

Book Review – The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick

When I started this blog a little under two years ago, it was partly with the intention of writing detailed reviews of the ten or so PKD novels I consider to be the most vital. The Man in the High Castle (henceforth TMitHC) certainly falls into this category. I first read this in 1999 during my first exposure to the world of PKD, and at a guess I’d say that I’m up to my fourth reading by 2010. There aren’t many books I’ve cared to read four times, but the best of PKD definitely warrants this kind of attention.

TMitHC is a unique work in PKD’s vast opus for a number of reasons. Written in 1961, when the author was a tender 32 years old, it is in part an attempt to fuse the speculative riffs of earlier SF novels like Time Out of Joint and The Eye in the Sky with the gritty realism of the author’s then-unpublished mainstream novels like Mary and the Giant and Confessions of a Crap Artist. PKD tried to do this a number of times during his career, with limited success, but TMitHC must stand as a very significant exception. The novel is unique in that it is PKD’s only alternate history novel, set in a world where the Axis won WWII. The third unusual thing about TMitHC is that it is much better written than most of PKD’s work. By 1961, the author had written no fewer than 25 prior novels (according to Lawrence Sutin in his indispensible  biography Divine Invasions), a staggering number. This is not the work of an apprentice, and nor is it the work of an amphetamine-fuelled madman/genius/hack that pumped out twelve novels in two years. This is a work of craft, and it is the novel I’d point to in defending PKD from the allegation that he had good ideas but couldn’t write. PKD could write, so well that his work is still being pored over nearly thirty years after his death, but he rarely produced something as polished as this. In fact, I feel I can say with some certainty that this is the best written of his forty-plus titles. And the fourth reason TMitHC is unique in the master’s ouevre is that it was the only one of his novels to win a major award, the coveted Hugo in 1963. To an extent, this book saved and remade his career. Without it, he may never have gone on to produce novels like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik and VALIS.

Before I go on, I want to explain how influential this novel has been on me personally. In it, several of the characters use the Chinese Oracle, the I Ching, to guide them through their daily lives. I hadn’t heard of the thing in 1999, but I obtained a copy henceforth (the Richard Wilhelm translation with the introduction by Carl Jung) and have used it since. In TMitHC, PKD has his characters actually sitting down and using the I Ching in a way that serves as a good introduction to the Oracle and the ideas contained within. After using it extensively for several months, I became interested in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism and especially the writings of Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi in pinyin). One version, Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Parables of Chuang Tzu, translated by Victor Mair, is one of the ten books I’d take with me to a desert island if I was to spend the remainder of my life there. After that, I read some of the classics of Chinese literature, most notably the epic Three Kingdoms, as well as a number of books on Chinese history. This led me, in time, to modern day China and the writings of Ha Jin, Xinran, and my favourite, Ma Jian (whose novel Beijing Coma I reviewed in 2008 – the review easily has the most hits on this blog to this day). Ten years of inquiry, maybe even of enlightenment (even if only of the personal kind), can be traced directly back to Philip K Dick and The Man in the High Castle. Without it, I would not have been exposed to Taoist philosophy in 1999 and may never have proceeded down this path. So if I or anyone else ever questions the value of literature in people’s lives, I need only to point to my own example.

TMitHC opens in San Francisco with an odd little man by the name of Robert Childan, a man of limited intelligence and sympathy who runs an antique shop full of pre-war American kitsch. His main customers are the ruling Japanese, who apparently can’t get enough of the stuff. In the next couple of chapters, we are introduced to no less than four other viewpoint characters (I’ll explain what I mean by viewpoint characters in a minute). Frank Frink is a Jewish man living in the same Pacific States of America who has recently lost his job and prior to that his wife. Nobusuke Tagomi is a high-ranking Japanese official who needs a gift for an important visitor. Juliana Frink is a judo instructor and Frank’s ex-wife, living in the Rocky Mountain States. And Mr Baynes is a Swedish plastics maker arriving by Nazi rocket in San Fran to meet Mr Tagomi.

*This next paragraph relates to the craft of writing. Ignore it if you aren’t interested in this. *

This is PKD’s technique and he makes it work exceptionally well in TMitHC. The technique is to have a large number of characters who narrate shortish sections (there are often two distinct sections per chapter), giving the reader an insight into their states of mind. This is not the same as having an omniscient narrator who has access to the thoughts of all characters and moves in and out of those minds at will. Omniscient narrators tend to impose a certain monolithic narrative that gives precedence to the perspective of that godly narrator, and in turn the author. PKD does not do this. Instead, he sets a number of individual minds into motion, all with differing opinions and concerns, and basically pits their interests against one another. The characters will come into contact with each other in varying ways, and will ultimately directly influence each other’s lives. So Childan and Tagomi are on opposite sides of an important transaction, Frank and Juliana on opposite sides of the country, and the mysterious Baynes ties it all together. I like this technique so much that I’ve spent a decade trying to teach myself to write like this myself.

*Writing section ends.*

What surprised me this time around reading TMitHC is that the narrative moves very slowly to begin with. Largely the early chapters consist of the characters just thinking about their lives while they attend to mundane tasks like shaving or cooking breakfast. The interest derives from the world they are thinking in and about. Very rapidly we are given to understand that the Japanese and Germans not only won the war but have conquered and divided the United States among themselves. The novel is supposed to be set in PKD’s own time (let’s call it 1962, the year the novel was published), meaning that fifteen years have passed since the war ended in 1947. Furthermore, the Nazis have already remade much of the globe in their image: purging Africa of its natives, hurtling across the sky in their super-fast rockets, filling in the Mediterranean Sea, and conquering the solar system. They’ve made it to Mars already, for example. This is supposed to be 1962 or thereabouts. And here we run into PKD in wild speculation mode of a kind that would not usually be found in an Axis Won WWII narrative. This is the same PKD who, in his next novel Martian Time-Slip, had a fully functioning colony on Mars in 1992. If the rapid conquest of the solar system can be explained away in TMitHC, then it is only in imagining the crazed Nazis at the helm.

The story finally gets going in chapter five, but it does so in an oblique way. Frank tries and fails to get his job back, and a colleague called Ed McCarthy tries to convince him to go into business alone. It turns out that Frank has been in the business of making fake Civil War antiques that are eventually sold to the Japanese. When a man supposedly from a Japanese aircraft carrier comes in to Robert Childan’s shop on the pretext of wanting to buy 12 antique pistols, he examines one of the pistols carefully and declares it to be a fake. Enraged, Childan tries to get to the bottom of how he was sold a fake pistol, and the discovery ends up having a negative influence on Frank and Ed’s employer, as was their intention (there was no aircraft carrier). But the employer suspects Frank and Ed of being behind the sting, and vows to pay them off and find a way to get at them subtly. Such as telling the Nazis that Frank is really a Jew (his real name is Fink, not Frink). In this chapter we also have an extended discussion on the nature of the real versus the forged, and the ultimate inconsequence of such categories. Here, too, were are introduced to a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by one Hawthorne Abendsen, which is an alternate history in which the Allies, not the Axis, won WWII. Only PKD could have thought of that. And here is the genius at work, putting the reader into a disorientating bind of reality vs illusion in a far more subtle way than he would do in any of his other novels. I won’t spoil the rest for those that haven’t had the pleasure of reading this yet. Happy reading.

14 books read in Jan 2010: more miniature reviews

I like to read around a book a week or 50 books a year. Mostly fiction. Mostly 20th century literature but some historical stuff as well, and science fiction by authors of particular interest to me (I stopped reading widely in the genre years ago). But I am proud to say that I finished no fewer than 14 books in the month of January, which puts me on target for a collosal 168 books for the year. There’s no way in hell I’ll get anywhere near that though. For a start, I ‘only’ have about 35 more books in my possession that I want to read, and the pace inevitably slackens as the school year gets going, which it is about to do. I posted some mini reviews earlier in the month, so here are a few more. Let’s start with the ones that aren’t by Harry Crews first.

Lenin’s Embalmers by Ilya Zbarsky

Basically this is a strange mixture of biography of the author’s father who was responsible in part of the embalming of V. I. Lenin after his death in 1924, and partly the author’s own autobiography. It did give an unusual insight into the world of Communist Russia in the early twentieth century, but there was a whole heap in here of fairly tangential interest. You’d have to be a Russia buff to appreciate this. Or an embalmer, I guess.

Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney

It’s been a full twelve months since I fell in love with the work of Raymond Chandler. I read a book called Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved which, while interesting in parts, made Chandler’s life seem quite dull. Hiney’s approach is less exhaustive, breezy even, but it made for a good, short introduction to the somewhat strange life of Raymond Chandler. I’m recommend it as a starting point, but I feel that there’s probably more to Chandler’s life than Hiney has covered here. Perhaps that was a wise decision though, as Chandler doesn’t appear to have left much of a paper trial behind him.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

I finally got around to reading the first novel in my Library of America Complete Works edition, and I have to say that it was a slight disappointment. There’s nothing especially wrong with Wise Blood – it has a couple of interesting and elusive characters in Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery – but as the book was concerned with matters of faith and heresy, I was left unmoved by the whole thing. It’s quite short, and while very well written, it didn’t strike a nerve with me. I’m expecting more from O’Connor’s later work (she was younger than I am now when she published this).

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick

I’ve read this many times before. Full review to follow.

Onto the Crews books then…

Celebration by Harry Crews

His last novel except for the novella length An American Family (which I’m yet to read), Celebration is strong for about the first ten pages before descending into godawful drivel with occasional comic relief. I’m trying to repress the memory of how poor this is, so I can’t quite recall the names of the characters now, but suffice to say that he covered this ground much more effectively in at least two earlier novels. I was struck by how similar the setup was to that in the far superior The Gypsy’s Curse, which was written at least twenty years previously. In both books, a strong femme fatale character of superhuman strength and beauty pushes elderly folk into dangerous acts of self-renewal. I love Crews, but I’m afraid this one’s a stinker.

Karate is a Thing of the Spirit by Harry Crews

I knew I was going to receive a tacky paperback edition of this novel, given that the edition I ordered was published by Sphere in the early seventies, but the cover is the definition of tacky. I suppose I should scan and upload it, but that’d involve more effort than typing this does. EDIT: all right, I had to do it. This cover has to be preserved for posterity. Luckily the novel itself is a good one. In it, we are introduced to a guy called John Kaimon who wants to join an outlaw karate cult run by a guy known only as Belt. There’s another femme fatale, this one named Gaye Odell. There’s an empty swimming pool, a lot of gay men chasing after John, and a cult of people who eat pills all day long that they term ‘fresh fruit.’ Typical Crews carnival style, then. This is supposed to be among his best books, and while I certainly enjoyed reading it, I felt it lacked the punch of Crews’ very best work. But I could be wrong, and maybe it would help if I could track down the hardcover edition…

All We Need of Hell by Harry Crews

This one was a pleasant surprise in that I had somewhat lower expectations of it than I did of Karate, and yet I ended up liking this more. The novel, published in the late eighties, was Crew’s first after a decade-long hiatus. The first five chapters had already been published as The Enthusiast (which was itself republished in Florida Frenzy), and the character of Duffy Deeter had already appeared in A Feast of Snakes and in Where Does One Go When There’s No Place Left to Go? (although the latter wouldn’t be published until 1995). I hope you got all that. Written in a lighter, more comedic style in comparison with the darker A Feast of Snakes, All We Need of Hell is nevertheless an entertaining, amusing and thought-provoking read. The best thing about Crews’ novels is always the characters and the dialogue, and we have outstanding examples of both here. I can’t be bothered outlining the plot here, but Duffy Deeter and Tump Walker have got to be among the best of Crews’ characters. And some of the scenes, like the one where Duffy paddles his law partner Jert’s ass while the latter is having sex with the former’s wife, are among the funniest that Crews has written. Highly recommended.

But wait, there’s more:

Book Review – The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews

The Gospel Singer, published in 1968, was Harry Crews’ first novel. Hugely expensive in its first edition, I managed to obtain the 1995 Gorse reprint fairly cheaply. This edition also contains Crews’ quasi-sequel to The Gospel Singer, a strange little novella with the unwieldly title of Where Does One Go When There’s No Place Left to Go? But I’ll get to that later. The Gospel Singer is widely regarded as one of Crews’ best novels (some claim it to be his best), and while I believe it never quite attains the heights of his best works, it’s a sturdy and powerful novel nonetheless.

The Gospel Singer is quite a straightforward book really. What we have here is the town of Enigma, Georgia, a hick town that never produced anything of note except for the never-named Gospel Singer, who is said to have a heavenly voice. Early in the novel, the residents of Enigma are waiting for the great man to grace them with his presence. Crews shifts perspective a lot and doesn’t necessarily confine himself to one perspective per chapter. I guess you could say that we have an ominiscient narrator, but it comes across as messily deployed to me. But only a writer would think about that when reading this book.

Some of the author’s characters are beautifully and tragically drawn, however. That seems to be Crews’ main talent – to illuminate the myriad ecstasies and agonies of the human heart. That sounds a bit wanky, but I’ll let it pass if you will. So we have a strong chapter early on from the perspective of the Gospel Singer’s older brother Gerd, who is shown to have a terrible skin condition that makes him something of a freak himself. While he waits for his brother to return, Gerd is happened upon by one of the freaks from Foot’s freakshow, and he is forced to consider joining up as a way of escaping Enigma.

Another character hovering around the edge of this narrative is the ‘nigger’ (Crews’ word, not mine – same with the ‘freaks above) Willalee Bookatee Hull, who has just raped and murdered the Gospel Singer’s gilfriend MaryBell Carter. He’s in the jailhouse and soon to be lynched by the local mob. We don’t find out what really happened until near the end of the story, and as it turns out, it’s basically the Gospel Singer’s fault.

In fact, just about everything in The Gospel Singer turns out to be his fault, and if I can fault this book, maybe it’s in that the central idea is so central that all else seems peripheral. The Gospel Singer is supposed to be saving the souls of those who hear his beautiful voice, but in fact he himself is a Godless character who wants nothing but to screw his way around the US, which he does on every available occasion. This is the crux of the book – that the people of Enigma and surrounds are living a lie by placing their faith in the fallen Gospel Singer. He himself knows this, and he resents them for it and perpetuates the lie. His manager, Didymus, forces him to do singing exercises as penance for his sins. He’s also a murderer himself, having slaughtered the singer’s original manager. Whew. That makes for a pretty grim novel, does it not?

And the mob. Just like in the later (and better) A Feast of Snakes, the mob is the personification of evil itself in The Gospel Singer. The crowd builds and builds as the novel proceeds to its inevitable conclusion, and so does the stifling atmosphere of the novel. As the day draws to a close, the mob becomes increasingly lawless. A great number of these people are maimed or crippled themselves and in need of salvation. The embalmer’s daughter is blind and in need of a miracle to regain her sight, but in fact she is the only person who can see through the Gospel Singer’s image. And there are plenty of others trying to get a piece of him. Meanwhile, we have the king freak Foot (he has a 27 inch foot) presiding over his carnival nearby. It turns out that Foot has been following the Gospel Singer around the country, as the latter had suspected, but only as a way of drawing a crowd to his shows. Foot is probably the sanest character in the book, which is Crews’ way of showing us the uselessness of our categories of normal and freak, sane and insane. But it doesn’t stop the Gospel Singer from fucking Foot’s minder/girlfriend/whore when he’s out.

There’s a little more to the novel than this, but not much. Toward the end, I felt that Crews was simply sending the Gospel Singer on a tour of all the remaining characters that were worth talking to. The plot creaks a little and there are a few passages where the writer’s voice seems a little unsure. But if The Gospel Singer is ultimately only three quarters of what Crews could achieve as a writer, I know this for a fact because I’ve already read two of the novels where he perfected this apocalyptic arc: The Gypsy’s Curse and A Feast of Snakes.

Where Does One Go When There’s No Place Left to Go? is a novella length metafiction of a kind that Crews has expressed a distate for in several interviews. In it, some of the characters from his novels come to life and visit him in his cabin by the swamp, before capturing Crews and taking him on a road trip in Duffy’s modified Winnebago. These characters are Duffy Deeter (who has a minor role in A Feast of Snakes and a major one in the then-unwritten All We Need of Hell), Fat Man from Naked in Garden Hills, Belt from Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, Herman and Margo from Car, and the Gospel Singer and Didymus from the novel discussed at length above.

There are interesting aspects of this novella, but mainly those that relate to the writing process and the strange bind Crews has placed him in here. As a work of fiction, or even metafiction, this must be regarded as a failure. The characters say their pieces, interact to some extent, and get their revenge on Crews, but the story itself goes nowhere. For a work that is scarcely 100 pages in length, I found myself bored at least two or three times. I’m glad I read this, but I’m even more glad that I didn’t shell out a hundred dollars for a secondhand edition of this novella in its standalone edition.

Yellowcake Springs: it is done

After a month of hard work, I finally feel like I’m finished with Yellowcake Springs. It’s been written, revised, and rewritten in part, and now it’s 71,000 words long. There’s always more work that can be done on it, of course, and no doubt I’ll give it another run through in the not-too-distant, but I think it’s fair to say that Yellowcake Springs is now officially looking for a home. I’ve got a few targets in mind. Until then, it’s time to kick back with the 40 or so books on my 2010 reading list and try to enjoy the remaining 10 or so days of my summer holidays.

2010: 12 days old, 5 books read

Yes, I’ve done a lot of reading already this decade, so much that I can’t hope to review these books properly. A short paragraph on each is to follow.

Thirst by Ken Kalfus

I’ve been very enthusiastic about Kalfus since reading his book of stories PU239 and Other Russian Fantasies last year. Thirst is his other book of stories, and they’re every bit as good. About half of these stories are short, say less than ten pages, and those shorter pieces are generally flippant in tone or extended joke pieces, but the longer works, most notably “The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivial Quiz”, “Rope Bridge” and “No Grace on the Road” are fabulous. I haven’t said anything illuminating here, only that I enjoyed reading this book very much and would highly recommend it.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus

Kalfus’ debut novel is set in two distinct periods of Russian history, the first in 1910 surrounding the death of Leo Tolstoy, and the second in 1924 around the death of V.I. Lenin. For the most part, we are told the story from the viewpoint of a ‘new Soviet man’ called Gribshin who makes a friend of Stalin long before he’s the tyrant he’d later become. In the second part of the novel, Gribshin is calling himself Astapov after the town of Astapovo where Tolstoy died in 1910. While possibly not as alluring as his shorter work (I wonder whether I’d have given this the chance it deserved had I not read Kalfus’ shorter work previously), The Commissariat of Enlightenment proved to be a substanial and even educational read. But I still think Kalfus is a better short story writer.

A Matter of Death and Life by Andrey Kurkov

I hadn’t heard of Kurkov of all. He’s a Ukrainian writing in Russian whose works have been translated in recent years into English. A Matter of Death and Life is a slim but beguiling read about a man in Kiev who decides to hire his own hit man (i.e. to kill him) after a relationship turns sour. But things become complicated when the hit man bungles the murder and our protagonist decides he wants to live after all. Thing work out well in the end though. This was a great little book, and a lot of the enjoyment I got from it was in reading about post-Soviet Russia, which sounds like no laughing matter.

The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

This is the sequel to Regeneration, which told the story of Seigfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in a mental institution during World War 1. I enjoyed Regeneration, but The Eye in the Door floored me, and is certainly my favourite of the five books I’ve read so far in 2010. This time around Barker focuses on her fictional creation Billy Prior, a deeply traumatised man who has experienced the horrors of the war firsthand. He’s also bisexual in a society where such a thing is more than frowned upon, and a government snitch to boot. His job is to find deserters in the poorer parts of England, a job complicated by the fact that he personally knows several deserters. Oh, and did I mention that Prior suffers from ‘fugue states’ where he loses several hours of his life at a time? This is simply fascinating, gripping writing, and I can’t wait to read the final volume in the trilogy, The Ghost Road.

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

I didn’t see this one coming–my sister brought it around for me to read and I finished it the same day, which isn’t too surprising given that it’s just 174 pages in length. What we have here is an apocalyptic piece or rather a series of several short pieces set in a future gone pear shaped indeed. At first it seemed to me that this would be a fairly routine dystopia, but I was wrong. What I enjoyed most about this was the way it continually surprised me; the book succeeded in unfolding in unexpected ways. You’ll have to read it for yourself to see what I mean.

Crewsin’ for Crews

Readers of this blog will know how enthusiastically I’ve been reading American author Harry Crews in recent months. Of the twenty-one books of his that appear to exist (including a book of essays ON him), I’ve managed to get my hands on twelve of them thus far. I’ve read ten of these, not having not around to Celebration or The Mulching of America yet. Today I’ve managed to spend another $70 on four of the remaining nine titles via Abebooks: The Gospel Singer/Where Does One Go When There’s No Place Left to Go?, All We Need of Hell and The Knockout Artist.

That takes me up to sixteen titles, but what of the remaining five? I am inclined to discount Crews’ last book An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings on the account that it is a late work and an extremely expensive one.  But the other four are all earlier Crews novels, one of which the author regards as his best. The titles are:

Naked in Garden Hills

This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven

The Hawk is Dying

Karate is a Thing of the Spirit

The last of these is probably the cheapest to obtain, at least in paperback, but the others, and the first two especially, are absurdly expensive. Naked in Garden Hills, Crews’ second novel and in his opinion his best, goes for upwards of $100 US on Abebooks. Ebay even more expensive. This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven is little better. This leads me to wonder why these novels have NEVER been reprinted. It’s very frustrating.

Yellowcake Springs: first draft complete

Yep, it exists. Even if I died now, Yellowcake Springs has come into existence. Still needs a lot of work, of course. But I’ve got all of Jan to work on it…

I wrote 17,500 words in the past 13 days, which is a good rate for me. The whole ms. is 81,000 words and 280 double spaced pages.

Obligatory picture. Those stacks are quite beautiful in their way:

2009: What I read

I  seemed to have read no more than 47 books in 2009, which is somewhat down from the 59 I got through in 2008. I did finish with a flurry though – at one stage I seemed to have read no more than about 20 books by August or so. Here’s the list of the books.

Barker, Pat - Regeneration

Barrett, Andrea - The Middle Kingdom

Bond, Tiffany - Confessions of a Female Private Investigator

Chandler, Raymond - The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye, The High Window, The Little Sister, Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved

Crews, Harry - A Feast of Snakes, A Childhood: A Biography of a Place, The Gypsy’s Curse, Car, Body, Critical Perspectives on Harry Crews, Florida Frenzy, Scar Lover, Blood & Grits, Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews

Coetzee, JM - Disgrace, Stranger Shores, Youth

Croome, Andrew - Document Z

Cook, Kenneth - Wake in Fright

DeCeglie, JJ - Damned Good

Dick, Tessa - The Owl in Daylight

Disch, Thomas - The Wall of America

Donovan, Tom (ed) - The Hazy Red Hell

Gray, Alasdair - Poor Things

Hosseini, Khaled - The Kite Runner

Kalfus, Ken - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

Kinnane, Stephen - Shadow Lines

Landsdowne, Andrew - The Disposssessed

McCarthy, Cormac - The Road

Philby, Eleanor - Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved

Rafter, Steven - 209: A Story

Scholz, Carter - The Amount to Carry

Vandermeer, Jeff - Finch, Booklife

Walton, C.S. - Ivon Petrov, Russia though a Shot Glass

Warner, Alan - These Demented Lands, Morvern Callar, The Man Who Walks

Wilson, Charmaine - Spirit Whispers, Spirit Children

Whorton, James - Approximately Heaven

Ye, Yang - Vignettes from the Late Ming

Zhang, Lijia - “Socialism is Great!”

A year ago I vowed to read more books by women in 2009, but it appears that just 8/47 of these books were written by women. I did find a couple I liked through: Andrea Barrett and Pat Barker especially. But my highlight of the year was undoubtedly reading Harry Crews. Crews has published about 21 books, of which I’ve now read 10. I have another 2 (Celebration and The Mulching of America) to read, and another 9 to track down. Some of his earlier books, like Naked in Garden Hills, are ridiculously expensive secondhand. But I expect I’ll find some of them.

I’ve been on a book buying binge over the last couple of months and, as a consequence, I have no fewer than 39 books on my to-read list, which is nearly a year’s supply. 11 of these are by women. I plan to read Flannery O’Connor, Pat Barker (the second and third volumes in the ‘Regeneration’ trilogy), Richard Flanagan, Ken Kalfus, and the rest of Alan Warner and Harry Crews.