Evan's Newsletter

Recommendations are a funny thing; you can be given a book, told why you might like it, enjoy it and then think, wait, am I really like that? Is this my face for the world to see?

Trying to write in praise of Middlemarch is like standing under the ceiling of Sistine chapel and doing anything other than just looking at it. It’s so purely great that I almost want to end it right here: just look at it! Just read the book! But trudge on we must, and on we will go. Middlemarch is a staggering achievement, a whole world put under a microscope and perfectly realized.

Earlier this month, Nathan Heller wrote on a long feature in The New Yorker called “The End of the English Major,” a broad report on the decline in humanities majors across US universities. After a brief stir among academic types, all the attention on the article was eventually diverted to a different New Yorker article on academia, Rachel Aviv’s pulp-novel-of-ideas on philosopher Agnes Callard’s marriages.

Thanks to paid subscriber and good friend Matt Butler for encouraging me to read this one. Moving to the sticks and living the range life – if I could settle down… then I would settle down… – is the dream of many a city slicker, all those worn down by the hustle, bustle, grime, smell, unknown liquids, rodents and roaches of urban life, not to mention the cost of living.

“I have written only what I remember. If read as a history, one will object to the infinite lacunae … books based on reality are often only faint glimpses and fragments of what we have seen and heard.” - Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon (translated by Jenny McPhee).

A train derailing and causing an environmental disaster in the same small Ohio town where a movie about a train derailing and causing an environmental disaster had just finished filming (the film itself based off a forty year old novel about a train derailing and causing an environmental disaster in a small Ohio town); AI programs touted as sophisticated learning machines spitting out refined cliche copypasta before having faux-sentient existential breakdowns or just becoming fully racist...

Thanks to paid subscriber (and longtime friend) Tim G. for getting me to read this one – paid subscribers get to commission reviews and pieces, read exclusive pieces, and get personalized recommendations, so sign up today! What are we to do with a book that’s won the Booker Prize before it even reaches our shores?

Long breaks, refractory periods, writer’s block, shmwriter’s block: César Aira laughs at the long-established writer’s practice and just keeps putting out books, at least two a year and sometimes up to five.

Sounds counterintuitive, I know, but the recent vintage of post-apocalyptic literature is resoundingly hopeful. Despite the grim environs of their settings, books like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise,or even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road focus in on survivors trying to make it in the new world, valiantly persisting in order to continue on the human race .

Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. You can go ahead and call me Howard Bloom, Harold’s less-serious cousin. Today’s inductee: Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit. Popularity breeds resentment; the more you hear about something, the quicker you’ll get tired of hearing about it.