The Year in Reading (2024)

                                                       

Another year in reading is coming to a close. There were some wonderful discoveries, most especially The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, an incredible novel that is a collection of interconnected short stories adding up to a big picture-- there are two hubs in the book, one a Siberian mining town in the far north, the other an unremarkable 19th century painting by a little-known Chechen. Not only was its intricate structure engrossing, but the prose was sublime. 

The other new-to-me novel I relished was The Sympathizer, about a Vietnamese spy living in LA in the 1970s. It's worth a read just for the first 100 pages and the fall of Saigon. 

David Mitchell's Ghostwritten was a nice experiment. His first novel shows he had the chops to put together his eventual magnum opus, Cloud Atlas. And I really liked Mitchell's latest novel, Utopia Avenue, about late 60s London's rock scene. (His Japanese novel number9dream was pretty bad, but I tip my hat for having the chutzpah to write a Japanese character's story).

There was only one true disappointment, Elena Ferrente's My Brilliant Friend. This was actually listed in the New York Times as the #1 novel of the 21st century. That is an abominable selection. The story of a girl coming of age in Naples in the 1950s is as boring as any book I've read the last five years. And the prose is insipid and lazy. I'm flabbergasted and confused at the way critics approach literature today. Just skip this book, please.

Interesting that I read nearly the same number of books in 2024 as I did in 2023, 31 this year, compared to 30 last year. 21 of the books were novels, eight were nonfiction, two poetry. Nearly half of the books read in 2024 were rereads (14 in all, 12 of them novels, one a history of the spice trade to prep for my summer trip to Java, Indonesia, the other a volume of Bukowski poetry). Only one book read this year was on the kindle (The Sympathizer) and I lost the kindle returning from the Middle East.

Despite this being a presidential year and there were many temptations to deep-dive the news, I abstained enough to get long-form reading done. With the circus back in the White House, hopefully, I'll be able to remain aloof from the clickbait disasters we have coming our way. Can't say enough how much more fulfilling my days are reading novels instead of the news. 

I'm not sure how many new books I will be able to get through in 2025. I'd like to finally finish David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest,  Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Those three together could take six months. They are not casual reads. They are ambitions. 

Here are the books read in 2024. Those with an * designate a reread.

1 Our Man in Havana Graham Greene *

2 Stoner John Williams *

3 Japan the Paradox of Harmony Hirata & Warschauer

4 The Flamethrowers Rachel Kushner *

5 Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut *

6 Understanding a Photograph John Berger

7 The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen

8 The Committed Viet Thanh Nguyen

9 Jesus Son Denis Johnson *

10 Eyeless in Gaza Aldous Huxley *

11 Final Cut Steven Bach

12 The Broom of the System  David Foster Wallace *

13 McTeague Frank Norris *

14 Last Night on Earth Poems Charles Bukowski *

15 Mike Nichols: A Life Mark Harris 

16 Already Dead Denis Johnson *

17 The Spice Trade John Keay *

18 Once Alice Walker

19 The Whole Brain Child Dan Siegel

20 The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai *

21 Riven Rock TC Boyle

22 The Day of the Locusts Nathanael West *

23 My Brilliant Friend Elena Ferrente 

24 Utopia Avenue David MItchell

25 Our Country Friends Gary Shteyngart

26 Five Came Back Mark Harris

27 number 9 dream David Mitchell

28 Ghostwritten David Mitchell

29 The Psychology of Money Morgan Housel

30 The Tsar of Love and Techno Anthony Marra

31 The English Patient Michael Ondaatje *

The Year in Reading 2023

2023 was a very good year in reading. After a drop-off the previous year I managed to finish reading thirty books for the first time in a few years, and I think this was the first year in some time I eschewed reading on a kindle. I just don't like reading longform text on tablets or phones and have found that the best method for a good night's sleep is thirty minutes' reading before bed. 

If I lived in the US I would certainly have a library card and be borrowing books of recently published fiction or essay collections all the time. I live in Japan so instead of a surplus wealth of unread fiction available I have reliably affordable health and dental care (which is preferable for me). I recently catalogued and indexed my personal library here in Kyoto and there are about 600 books, about three novels for every two books of nonfiction, which feels not insignificant.

And I've come to really embrace the satisfaction of the reread, especially fiction. This year 26 of the 30 books read were novels or short story collections and of those 26 books, 17 of them were rereads. For the first time in about 20+ years I reread Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and James Baldwin's Another Country and I was overwhelmed by these books' awesomeness. I can reread F Scott's Tender Is the Night, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio every few years-- they are that good and through multiple readings I feel the books become that much more a part of me, as if my love for them makes my life that much more wondrous and meaningful. 

Of the books I read for the first time this year, I was struck how powerful Flannery O'Connor's short stories were. They had so much pathos, action, drama, comedy, and tragedy. How in the world did it take me this long to read it? Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads was a classic character- and plot-driven family novel that felt like a return to form that made The Corrections so special. Claire Ohshetsky's Chouette, a story about a woman who gives birth to an owl-child was a very strange, absolutely unique work of art. 

The books marked with an * designate a reread.

Crossroads Jonathan Franzen

Tender is the Night F Scott Fitzgerald*

Disgrace J M Coetzee*

Look at Me Anita Brookner

Chouette Claire Ohshetsky

Life and Times of Michael K J M Coetzee

The Stranger Albert Camus*

A Visit from the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan*

The Collected Stories  Roald Dahl*

The Mosquito Coast Paul Theroux*

The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck*

Ask the Dust John Fante*

A Room With a View E. M. Forster*

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country Ken Kalfus*

On Writing Stephen King

A Pale View of Hills Kazuo Ishiguro

The Complete Stories Flannery O'Connor

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera*

Blue Highways William Least Heat Moon

A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh*

Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey

What Makes Sammy Run Budd Schulberg*

Making Movies Sidney Lumet

Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room James Baldwin

Another Country James Baldwin*

Going to Meet the Man James Baldwin

Reflections in a Golden Eye Carson McCullers*

Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson*

Ragtime E. L. Doctorow*

The Year in Reading (2020)

                                                                       

                                                                     Halldor Laxness

<<Brushes the dust off. A lot of dust>>

Been a long time. Nearly four years since the last entry. For the record I read a few books in 2017, 2018 and 2019, but life intervened. It still does and will always do so. I suppose more than anything I do these lists for my own pleasure, as it gives me perspective into my habits and dedication.  Nevertheless, I find it's nice to share, even if only a handful of friends visit. If this particular list might lead anyone else into reading Halldor Laxness' incredible novel, Independent People, then this effort in mild vanity will be worthwhile.

Because 2020 was a catastrophic year for the planet I found myself rubbernecking the first six months, finally swearing off the news for the first two to three hours in the morning, when I tend to read for an hour straight with my morning coffee, something I endeavored in most of my twenties. And if I'm still awake after putting my son to sleep, I'll read for another thirty to sixty minutes. There are days, days of marvelous indulgence, in which I take time off from everything and read for six or seven hours straight, though those days are rare enough to be treasured.

I'm pretty sure that over the past few years I'm only averaging 25-30 books a year. This year, it was only 26 books (though nearly two months of it was taken up by Anna Karina). Because I like breaking lists down, of the 26 books read, thirteen of them were novels, three were story collections, nine were non-fiction, and one was a book of poetry (I read about half of Carl Sandburg's Harvest Poems but did not finish it). There were nine books reread (marked by a +). Just three books were read on a kindle marked by a *). Kindle is extremely convenient of course, but I find reading actual paper books so much more pleasurable. It's more sensory, the feel, smell, and sound of crackling paper. I love how paper books fill out a shelf. They beckon so much more than digital files do.

Some wonderful rereads were Bowles' The Sheltering Sky and John O'Hara's Appointment in Samara. Both deal with self-destruction, characters knowingly ruining their lives because they descend past a point of no return in their destructive behavior. I know it's not for everyone, but to me, this is what makes literature so fascinating. We all have our bad habits that we keep in check or don't. Literature gives us characters who are cautionary tales with dramatic consequences. 

The deterioration of my esteem of Hemingway continued in rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I rather liked 23 years ago (rereading The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast the past few years and finding them mawkish dreck has also also been disappointing). I loved Franzen's The Corrections almost twenty years ago, and found Purity occasionally brilliant and very readable, but that Franzen was also somewhat indelicate and corny in his prose. I liked John Fowles' Magus, but at the same time found its premise of this manufactured theater of love on a remote Greek island a bit ridiculous and highly improbable.

Some wonderful surprises that I rather adored were Rittenhouse's oral history of early twentieth century Major League Baseball, mostly told by players from the Deadball era; and James Crumbley's private dick road novel, The Last Good Kiss, which should be a lot more famous than it is. Keefe's history of the Troubles in Ireland reads like an action film and cleared up a lot of confusion I had for the era. And Van Reybrouk's history of Congo is like reading about a country that has been living a 2020-style crisis existence for sixty years. 

Last really pleasant surprise was rereading Bukowski and thoroughly enjoying him. Hank Chianski was something of a hero for me coming of age, but I disowned him for a long time because all his poems seemed to be about intoxication, hangovers, easy women with nasty habits, and being drunk in the afternoon. And it's true, most of his poems are about this, but the ones that aren't touch quite lyrically on the precarious life of the artist. And the ones that do have that Bukowski signature, vulgar and sophomoric as they may be, are often quite funny. Maybe because that life of a wanton romantic is such a distant memory now, there's a certain nostalgic charm in his misadventures with drink and women.

                                                                        Charles Bukowski

I read War and Peace ten years ago in a reading group that deep-dived Tolstoy's story and his intentions and would have enjoyed doing that again. Anna Karina is a parlor piece drama about the habits, mores, and relationships in late 19th century Russian high society. It climaxes with a vivid account of a nervous breakdown of the book's heroine. The novel enables Tolstoy to critique hypocrisy in the bourgeois, exalt in the simplicity of the Russian peasant as a counterpoint, and explore spirituality (rather than religion) as integral for a meaningful life. He does this without pedantry or too much obviousness, but beautifully through his characters.

        

                                                                               Leo Tolstoy

As mentioned, Laxness's Independent People was perhaps my favorite discovery. It's about the decades-long travails of a late 19th century Icelandic sheep farmer suffering bad luck on a remote rock of crummy soil. That might not sound very engaging, but the main hero, Bjartur of Summerhouse, is quite a personality. Not only does Bjatpur have an incredible penchant for misfortunate folly, screwing up at nearly every major life turning point, he is stubborn about every single issue dear to his heart, inflexible in will and judgmental to the end. He's flawed, funny, a regular Job on the rocks, who when he's in deep trouble turns to epic Norse poetry. The book is absolutely marvelous.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was read aloud to my son over a period of several months. It's the first long book I've read to him. It's not an easy book to read to a five-year-old, as it's full of nonsense that can be difficult to explain. But it's a fun book and he was there to the end. We started Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island-- I have an edition from 1915!-- and I've been reading it to him in a rather bad imitation of a Scottish brogue. But it sounds so much better this way.

Probably the most consequential book read this year was probably Amy Hempel's Collected Stories, because reading Hempel's wonderful pieces about the companionability of dogs, I decided to get one myself. I had a Belgian Shepherd-collie mix as a boy, but I hadn't taken care of him very well and felt that my karma with dogs suffered. I reckoned that adopting a dog would take some effort, but the timing of my decision coincided with a friend of my wife's having the exact breed of dog I desired (a Kai Ken). His name is Monk, after Thelonious, and he's a beautiful, gentle creature that goes with me nearly everywhere. Books really can change your life.

                                                                            

                                                                            Amy Hempel

Here's the list for 2020:

1) Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind (+)

2) My Struggle: Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard (*)

3) Say Nothing: A History of the Irish Troubles by Patrick Radden Keefe (*)

4) The Magus by John Fowles

5) The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (*)

6) Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouk

7) A Personal Matter by Kenzuboro Oe (+)

8) A Lateral View by Donald Ritchie

9) Love Is A Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski

10) Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth

11) Purity by Jonathan Franzen

12) For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (+)

13) Collected Stories by Amy Hempel

14) Airships by Barry Hannah

15) Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind (+)

16) Appointment in Samara by John O'Hara (+)

17) Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

18) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (+)

19) Independent People by Haldor Laxness

20) The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter

21) Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu Murukami (+)

22) The Last Good Kiss by James Crumbley

23) Anna Karina by Leo Tolstoy

24) Ways of Seeing by John Berger

25) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

26) Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck 

A Year in Reading (2016)

(photo (c) Steve McCurry)

2016 was a surprisingly productive year for reading books. I'm actually amazed I was able to read 27 books this year, since in addition to the following books I also read (almost always cover to cover) a year's worth of (weekly) New Yorkers and (monthly) Harpers. How I managed to do this is pretty straightforward: I did not watch much entertainment. I only watched 19 movies in 2017 (12 of them on planes and traveling-- also watched a couple seasons of TV). So basically in my down time, when I had it, I read.

Because of time constraints and end-of-the-day exhaustion I didn't manage to write a single post on any of the books I read, which is a shame because there were some real gems.

1) Mr. Bridge by Evan Connell (1969) *
2) Emerald City by Jennifer Egan (1993)
3) Howard Hughes: the Untold Story  by Peter Browne & Pat Broeske (1996)
4) Hiroshima  by John Hershey (1946)
5) Madame Bovary  by Gustave Flaubert (1856) *
6) Blindness by Jose Saramago (1995) *
7) Travels by Paul Bowles (2011)
8) Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
9) White Gold by Giles Milton (2004) *
10) Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud (1992) *

11) Balthazar and Blimunda  by Jose Saramago (1982)
12) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)
13) Magnum: the First 50 Years by Russell Miller (1999)
14) Star: Warren Beatty by Peter Biskind (2010) *
15) The Ongoing Moment by Geoffrey Dyer (2005)
16)  I, Maus by Art Spiegelman (1991)
17) Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood (1977)
18) The Harder they Come  by TC Boyle (2015)
19) A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (2012)
20) Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950)

21) Eileen  by Otessa Moshfegh (2015)
22) The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (2013)
23) In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki (1933)
24) Down and Out in Paris and London  by George Orwell (1933)
25) Tenth of December by George Saunders (2013)
26) Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015)
27) Zeroville by Steve Ericksson (2007)

So that's fourteen novels (including one graphic novel), three short story collections, and ten nonfiction books variously focused on biography, history, essay, photography, travel and one movie star. I made it a point to read only books I'd never read before and I also really gave in to Kindle reading this past year, reading six books in all on my electronic device (marked by an *). Also I made it a point to read more female authors  and among the seventeen fiction books I read, eight were written by women.

So what was good, what was bad? First the bad: Dave Eggers Hologram for the King and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. It's really embarrassing that Dave Eggers has emerged as one of the primary voices of our generation. I find his prose grotesquely saccharine and his narrative prowess entirely bland. Because of his good works with mentoring creative writing to underprivileged kids I want to like him, I really do, but I just don't. At least Hologram was a brisk read at 300 pages. Tartt's Goldfinch is 750 pages of awfulness. It is one of the extraordinary markers of our cultural illiteracy that such an extremely bad book like Goldfinch should have received so many plaudits. The story is absurd and the writing is abominably bad. It's 500 pages too long. I cannot remember reading a novel with so many redundant passages.  It took enormous will power to finish that terrible book. Forgive me if you are a fan, but I will never take a book recommendation from a Goldfinch fan.

Books I loved: Evan Connell's Mr. Bridge was a revelation: such a simple, quiet story of a middle-class Republican Kansas City family in the 1930s, but I loved it. An obscure classic. It was terrific to get around to Jose Saramago's fiction. Blindness is a terrifying vision (pun intended) of the apocalypse. And I've rarely read any books that capture 17th century Europe so beautifully as his Balthazar and Blimunda. I'd like to read all his books. Rachel Kushner's Flamethrowers is a gorgeous novel about the Downtown New York arts scene in the mid/late 1970s. Strangers on a Train deserves its status as a classic. The character of Bruno is one of the most sharply drawn psychopaths I've yet read. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Watkins was a bit overwritten at times, but is a very imaginative dystopian novel that posits a near future when California is a drought-ruined wasteland and its refugees are called Mojavs. There are terrific pieces in Paul Bowles Travels book; and George Orwell's Down and Out and Catalonia books are very funny, very sad, and always very sharp. I should have loved Steve Ericksson's Zeroville, a weird novel about 1970s New Hollywood and all the artist that came out of that scene, but I only really liked it. Everyone should read that biography on Howard Hughes. There have been very few stranger lives.

One of my goals for 2017 will be to get back into writing about the books read this year. Hope I can stick to it. Stay tuned.

A Year in Reading (2015)

(Spring, 2015)

2015 was yet another wonderful year in reading, though I only managed to finish twenty-one books in all. One reason was I wanted to spend less time following current events on the computer so I invested in subscriptions to Harpers, The New Yorker, and the UK film magazine Sight & Sound. And I was good about reading most issues cover to cover (excepting Sight & Sound, of which there is a pile of unread issues.) However, the most important reason for finishing fewer books is the birth of my son, Tennbo, on January 18th. I'd known that when you have kids certain sacrifices have to be made and a big one was time for reading. If I were lucky I might be able to read Tennbo a poem or two before he puts the magazine or book into his mouth and screams, but that was it. Daddy time superseded reading-chair time by a long ways.

The following list of books has an * marked for rereads. The first twelve books are linked to reviews I posted on this blog. (Once my son learned to crawl, life became too distracted, time too precious for this sort of reflection):

1) The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein (2014)
2) Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger ((1953)
3) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)
4) Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1940)
5) Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver (1990) *
6) The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch (1969)
7) Desperate Characters by Paula Fox (1970)
8) Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992) *
9) The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson (2014)
10) Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
11) My Lunches with Orson by Henry Jaglom (2
12) Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn (2013)
13) A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964) *
14) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961)
15) The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (1976)
16) Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates (1962)
17) The Creator by Eva Minervudottir (2013)
18) The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra (2007)
19) Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles by Barney Hoskyns (2009)
20) The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer (1991)
21) Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmasking of American Consensus by Rick Perlstein (2001)

In all, there are eleven novels, three story collections, four histories, two memoirs, and a book of collected interviews. Only three books were rereads.

I can't recommend novelist Richard Yates enough. I'd bought a collection and ended up reading all three books in a very short time frame. Such beautiful tragic realism, such tight, wonderful sentences. Eugenides' The Marriage Plot is a bit cumbersome at times, but very enjoyable. Murdoch's The Nice and the Good doesn't have a single bad sentence and begets me to try for more. And I will probably reread Carver's Where I'm Calling From many times over the course of my life. So many great, true, stories there.

If you have an interest in 1960s and 1970s politics I recommend both Perlstein histories, especially the one on Reagan, as the 1970s in America was such a fantastic place of displaced idealism and madcap schemes. And if you are game on 1960s and 1970s pop culture, particularly that of the Los Angeles variety both the Manson book and the history of LA music are terrific reads. The interviews with Orson Welles are delightfully aphoristic and very gossipy if you are familiar with the names of Golden Age Hollywood.

Disappointments: I found Master and Margarita an absolute slog to finish. It's an interesting story with great psychedelic visuals but the prose (at least in translation) is as leaden as a stone carving of Lenin sinking in the deep blue. And while I enjoyed Hemingway's A Moveable Feast as a young main in Paris many years ago, it reads poorly now not only for its sentimentality but also as an apologia of sorts for Hemingway dumping his first wife. The anecdotes regarding the legendary artists don't have enough catharsis to excuse such obviously thrilling namedropping. And, finally, there is not a single great read among J. D. Salinger's extraordinarily pretentious Nine Stories.

I did read one book on the kindle, the last one of the year, the history of Goldwater and the 1964 US Presidential election. I had long resisted e-readers primarily because of resistance to electronic technology in general, but finally gave in for the sake of convenience. Certainly if I lived in an American city with a great local bookstore I wouldn't bother, but my options in Kyoto are limited. Again, it's convenient to fit in my jacket pocket and I could read quietly with my son napping on my chest, but no question e-reading is inferior to the tangibility and feel of paper books. I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I guess that's okay too.

The Legend of Charlie Manson

"These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up."

--Charles Manson

There seems to be a resurgent groundswell of interest in Charlie Manson nowadays. There was the NBC miniseries Aquarius, a dramatized riff on the murders and in podcast land there's the ongoing Manson-in-Hollywood storyline on the series, You Must Remember This. But what launched all this interest in Charlie Manson was undoubtedly the new biography, Manson, written by Jeff Guinn and published in 2013. As a teenager, I'd read Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book on the Manson murders. Except for the antics of a few Manson Family members, nothing much has changed in the four decades to warrant a new book. Nevertheless, a different writer (also a less personally involved biographer than Bugliosi) would find different aspects of Manson's life to highlight. The consequence is a biography that is nearly unputdownable. No one symbolizes the decline and collapse of 1960s counterculture as Charlie Manson does. He is the Boogeyman incarnate to every mother and father worried about their kids straying into delinquency or worse.

Manson is written chronologically, from his parents' ill-fated meeting to the present day. Charlie Manson has lived for 80 years, but the biography specifically focuses on just four years of his life, from his arrival in San Francisco in March, 1967 to his guilty verdict in his circus trial in early 1971. Of course he had a terrible childhood and by the time he was 33 had spent the majority of his life in prison, where he had cobbled together a philosophy gleaned from aspects of the bible, pimps, Dale Carnegie, and Scientology. He had listened to the Beatles. He loved their music and dreamed of being as big a rock star as they were. However, he'd spent nearly the entire decade in correctional facilities so when he'd arrived in the Bay Area in 1967 it was like stumbling into Ground Zero of student activism (Berkeley and its Free Speech Movement) and the sex and drugs revolution (San Francisco's Haight Ashbury) without having witnessed or understood its flowering.

Manson's biographer calls Charlie "the wrong man in the right place at the right time." It didn't take long for someone so charismatic and skillfully manipulative to weave spells on emotionally insecure, drug-addled teenage girls. Free love and drugs became essential Manson tricks for running his personal harem. But as eventful as San Francisco was in the late 1960s, it wasn't Charlie's scene. He wanted to be a rock star and the recording industry was down in LA. Through a series of petty tricks and some swindling, he secured himself an old yellow schoolbus and he and the girls headed south.

Manson had convinced some of his followers that he was Jesus reincarnated

The thing about Manson is his story is the extreme version of what had been a very strange, exceptionally unique period in American society. And things got really weird in LA. His Family grew, not just with girls but guys too. LSD trips and group orgies which Manson directed became nightly bacchanals. But nothing really mattered much until Manson could secure a record contract. And despite being an ex-con with no musical background and limited talent, he befriended and auditioned with some prominent personalities including Paul Rothschild (the Doors producer), Frank Zappa, Neil Young, and notably Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys and Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, and a Boy Wonder at Columbia Records, producing numerous rock and roll hit records. Not only did Manson get inside Dennis Wilson's house-- he lived at Wilson's Bel Air pad in the summer of '68-- he got in Wilson's headspace as well, Wilson introducing him to nearly everyone he knew as a genius including Terry Melcher. Melcher hung out with him a little bit, but wouldn't let himself get too close. After auditioning Charlie he decided against signing him and put him out of his life. Until early 1969 Terry Melcher and his girlfriend, Candice Bergen, lived at 10050 Cielo Drive.

10050 Cielo Drive is, of course, where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowsky and Steve Parent were brutally murdered by Manson Family members Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkle. This is the watershed moment not just in Manson's life but in the downward spiral of hippie counterculture itself. How Manson convinced his followers to kill for him has terrified society for years. It was a very complicated moment for his cult: Manson had been preaching Helter Skelter for months, which was that an uprising by blacks (Manson was racist and feared the Panthers) would destroy the white race but blacks would be unable to govern and enlist the Manson Family to lead them (the followers hiding out in an underground abyss in Death Valley during Armageddon). All this was communicated to Manson in the Beatles' White Album. Of course, this sounds like absolute poppycock, but Manson Family members were heavily drugged on psychedelics and these were very paranoid times: Vietnam, race riots, urban uprisings, radical bombings, and political assassinations. What if a great race war was coming? What if Manson were right?

The Tate Murders had a two-fold purpose. One was to incriminate blacks so that they would be blamed for the high profile killings and thus take revenge on whites, jumpstarting the race war. To do this they smeared "Pigs" on the wall with Tate's blood. The other urgent matter was freeing a Manson associate, musician hunk Bobby Beausoleil, by doing a copycat murder so it would look like Bobby was innocent of the murder of Gary Hinman (an extortion deal of a music teacher/drug dealer gone bad that Manson had been involved in and thus eager to escape implication). He'd ingrained in his followers one of the tenets of Scientology-- that life and death were the same thing and thus it wasn't exactly murder but expediting the transmigration of the soul. Nuts, yes, but his followers, especially Tex Watson and Susan Atkins believed it and everyone wanted to be Charlie's favorite.

The Tate murders made sensational headlines but because the media failed to mention the Black Panthers connection, Manson had Watson, Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten murder a middle class couple, the LaBiancas, the following night. Los Feliz was a different neighborhood than Bel Air, and though the murders were just as grisly with bloody slogans splattered on the walls: "Rise," "Death to Pigs," and a misspelled "Healter Skelter," LAPD didn't connect the crimes. Amazingly, there were different detectives working on each case and it took police almost four months to crack the case. Luckily, Manson and some members of the family were already in custody in Death Valley after authorities confiscated some stolen dune buggies. The week the police announced Manson and his sect as the prime suspects in the Tate murders, four people died at the Altamont Free Concert in San Francisco. Between Manson and the bad press at Altamont, the hippie dream died that week. Longhairs weren't just slackers or bums, but were actually very dangerous. The trial of Manson and his followers would only highlight in detail how far gone down a rabbit hole Manson's hippie cult had fallen.

Not your average teenage hippie runaways

Like Adolf Hitler before him, all Charlie Manson wanted was to be a famous, respected artist. To be honest, his music isn't bad, better than a lot of groups at the time and sometimes, particularly when the Manson girls are singing, somewhat beautiful. If Terry Melcher had signed Manson to a record deal, he would have never been as big as the Beatles, but maybe Sharon Tate and her friends would still be alive today. Maybe the hippie dream, too, instead of dying a slow death in the 1970s, might have flourished and evolved and the United States would be a  more tolerant, liberal country today. The great, tragic irony is that Charlie Manson got his wish of eternal fame. And maybe some place this very moment some kid is listening to Manson's music, tripping out that this hippie murdering madman maybe had some good tunes too. And the other, great irony is that Manson did not murder anyone himself. But what had condemned Manson and made him so terrifying was that he could rally young people with malleable minds to shed blood for him. And again this echoes Adolf Hitler, who convinced regular people to organize the Holocaust and die for his world view. There is legitimate fear then, that anytime, anywhere, we might be just one charismatic madman away from local or global apocalypse. 

Lunch with Orson

"A typical few hours-- in short-- some stories, some hopefulness, some creative ideas, some anecdotes, some sadness, some old memories, much shared understanding, many communicative smiles."

-- Henry Jaglom regarding his last lunch with Orson Welles

Of the many larger than life personalities to come out of Hollywood over the last century, there is no one quite so substantial perhaps as Orson Welles. The maker of Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil,  F for Fake, and his legendary Shakesperean adaptations of Macbeth and Othello, lived out his life as an unreconstructed genius, which is to say he was too smart for his own good. At one point or another he had probably antagonized everyone in Hollywood, most especially the suits who could afford to produce a picture. After his wunderkind debut, he had trouble financing his projects, and some of his best films were destroyed in the editing room by antagonistic studio heads. An actor with presence and an incredible voice, his voracious appetite for life led him to becoming a legendary gourmand, with the terrible consequences of obesity and its attendant diseases. The last ten years of his life he struggled to get funding for his numerous unfinished projects, an amazing development when you consider how integral Welles was to moviemaking.

Like Welles, Henry Jaglom is an independent filmmaker who idolized Welles. They became buddies and met weekly at a restaurant called Ma Maison (where Wolfgang Puck got his culinary start in California). The last few years of Welles' life, Jaglom (with Orson's consent) had begun tape-recording their conversations. Two years worth of lunch conversations are collected in My Lunches with Orson (edited by Peter Biskind). A lot of the conversations are Jaglom and Orson talking shop: the travails of financing for Welles' films. They also gossip about the sex lives of stars in Hollywood's golden era and Orson relishes in pontification. The conversations, though freeform rambling are often thematically unique enough for provocative chapter titles ("Everyone should be bigoted" to "It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar.") 

Throughout, Orson is engaging and eminently quotable. He chastises the chastisers ("Irene Dunne was so dry-toothed and such a good fucking Catholic that I wanted to kick her in the crotch."). He impugns aesthetes with wide-ranging tastes ("I say there's a point where somebody can't really dig that other fellow if they dig this one. Our eyes, our sensibilities, are only so wide.") And ironically, he condemns the film industry (sneaking in a smear on ballet while he's at it): "You know, I'm not interested in other filmmakers-- and that's a terribly arrogant thing to say-- or in the medium. It's the least interesting art medium for me to watch that there is. Except ballet-- that's the only thing less interesting." Orson has a bombastic personality and perhaps a penchant for exaggeration, often  inserting himself Zelig-like into the lives of many an icon, but he peppers his relevance with an anecdote suggesting some truthfulness. While Jaglom does adore Welles, they're tight enough for Jaglom to call "Bullshit," when Welles really winds himself up.

But Welles can be something of a philosopher too. In one conversation, Jaglom is feeling guilty about failing to give up his film career to do good work in Africa. Their talk evolves into free will and the nature of good and evil. Orson, guilty as anyone of living for himself rather than the dying stranger is nevertheless cognizant of his shared culpability: "Even if there is nothing out there except a random movement of untold gases and objects, sin still exists. You don't need a devil with horns. It's a social definition of sin. Everything we do that is self-indulgent, and that is selfish, and that turns us away from our dignity as human beings is a sin against what we were born with, the capacities we have, what we could make of this planet."

Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom

Later in the conversation he acknowledges that a number of people depend on him-- not just family, but actors and technicians for work, and of course there was his audience. He can do much more collective good as a filmmaker than as another body distributing foodstuffs in Ethiopia. But this isn't arrogance, this is truth. Most of the talks between Jaglom and Welles are humorous but there is an underlying current of sadness in that by the 1980s, Orson had become a has-been. If he could have walked away he might have found closure with his past. He couldn't-- not just because he needed the work to pay off his debts, but a certain indelible pride precluded him from retiring from what he did best. The man never stopped plotting, scheming, dreaming. Welles died the night of October 10th, 1985, with a typewriter on his lap.

Life in Poisonville

"Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it."

Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel, Red Harvest, begins when our story's narrator, an unnamed detective from the Continental Agency, arrives in a small California town called Personville, pronounced and better known as Poisonville by the local population. While the detective is waiting for his client at his house, Donald Willsson, the client, is murdered. There are some obvious suspects, Willsson's gold digging wife, Mrs. Wilson, as well as a femme fatale called Dinah Brand and of course there are the local bootlegging gangsters-- Lew Yard and Pete the Finn, and a gambler monikered  Max "Whisper" Thaler. We're not a third of the way into the book before we've nabbed our killer (who is, of course, not one of the usual suspects), but there are too many bad guys in town for our detective to close the case and move on just yet. The detective cajoles the town's millionaire patriarch, the dead Donald's father, Elihu Willsson to employ him to root out the city's rampant corruption.

Turns out that Donald Willsson was one of the few reformers in town. His father Elihu, had built the city and it was a prospering mining town when city workers began striking fore better wages and living standards. Rather than give in and provide his miners with a better life, Elihu called in scabs to break the strike and gangsters to enforce his will. The strike was broken, the people's will demoralized, but the byproduct of Willsson's victory was villains staying on and taking over the city. Even the chief of police is in on the take and no one is safe from a double crossing. Thus Willsson's (albeit reluctant) acquiescence to the Continental Operative.

Though it begins like a conventional murder story, it does not stop there. A lot of people die in Red Harvest (one of the chapters is titled "The 19th Murder.") I suppose when one is birthing a genre, it is bound to be painful, and Hammett's novel is if not the first, one of the earliest novels of hardboiled noir fiction. The stories are violent, complex, and full of surprises, which are interesting in themselves, but the best reason to read the genre is the tough guy argot that permeates every page. Even more so than the Whouddnit aspect, it is the novel's language that makes it so uniquely noir. Nearly every line in the book is tightly wrought, a bit cruel, somewhat funny, often smart-ass: "'Who shot him?' I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: "Someone with a gun." The bad girls are incorrigibly bad but they are also tough, smarter than nearly everybody and hold their own boldly. Dinah Brand might be the nexus for every scam in town but she's a survivor in a time when most women gave up their freedom for housework. Her lines are among the choicest in the novel:  "You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, Ask me."

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett could write like this because he lived this life as a detective for the famous Pinkerton Agency and had been assigned to investigate labor disputes (not many aspiring writers have such an advantage with "Write what you know" advice). Incredibly talented, he should be more famous than he is (even if you've never heard of Hammett you're probably familiar with his most famous story, The Maltese Falcon, a classic story adapted for the screen with Humphrey Bogart as Hammett's best altar ego detective, Sam Spade). On the surface, noir fiction might seem like absolute mayhem and blanket nihilism, but at its core it's a blistering narrative of the consequences when society goes horribly wrong.  The title, Red Harvest might suggest Communist bushels of wheat, but the real harvest is blood and too much of it. And this violence is begotten not from the will of common thugs, but when political and economic forces conspire into disastrous conditions. Detectives like our hero in the Continental Op might be able to clean up a rotten place like Poisonville, but it's only a small town in a big, big country. Still, it is a start...

The Real Monsters

"What is the cause of man's inhumanity to man? Desensitization. The numbness of the perpetrator. Whether an activity produces pleasure, pain, discomfort, guilt, joy, triumph-- before too long the soul grows tired and stops feeling. It doesn't take long. Not too long at all, and then man becomes the devil, he laughs at his former scruples, he enslaves and tortures without compunction." 

As far as I know it all starts with Joseph Conrad, Africa forever and ever being contemplated as a heart of darkness. Its territory might be well mapped and colonialism finished and slavery (mostly) eradicated, in literature, at least, Africa continues to be represented as a kind of Wild West where adventurers, knaves, and plunderers thrive in the absence of law, order, and justice. Once it was human chattel, then precious metals like gold and diamonds, and lately, it is petroleum and other energy sources sought after by unscrupulous Chinese and terrorists. The great powers have long thrived treating Africans as pawns in the chessboard of diplomacy, not caring so much when pawns get knocked off or their land exploited or destroyed. Often in these stories our hero is the anti-sort, neither heroic nor monstrous, but with some compromised morals being tested by greed, mayhem, and slaughter.
     
Some of the better books I've read in this motif are Norman Rush's Mating and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters will not be among my favorites. It's about a 30-something adventurer, Roland Nair, who comes to Freetown, Sierra Leone to meet a friend named Michael Adriko, an African who had served in various African armies as well as American military units. Nair works for the N.I.I.A., the Nato Intelligence Interoperability Architecture, which sounds more bureaucratic than mercenary. Like any rough type making do in hell, he gets sloshed and cavorts with prostitutes. Adriko is on his fifth fiancée, Davidia, a black American beauty whose dad happens to be Adriko's commanding officer from the base he's gone AWOL from. Anyway, Adriko has some get-rich-quick information that's not forthcoming, stringing along an increasingly frustrated Nair, who has his own game going with some info on a US fiber optics cache location that he might or might not sell to an Arab named Hamid, who is probably not one of the good guys.

Speaking of good guys, Nair isn't one of them. He might be our voice in the novel, but there is nothing redeeming about him. He isn't charming, compassionate, sympathetic-- although that might be purposeful, as the true hero might be Michael Adriko, who is mysterious, charming, wily, and though he might be as corrupt or self-serving as Nair, he is, at least, a little bit likable. But corruption wears many faces and an epigrammatic con artist is still a crook. Adriko leads both Nair and Davidia on in a ruse to get them from Sierra Leone to the hinterlands of the Uganda-Congo border to meet his clan (Congo: now we're in genuine Heart of Darkness territory). There are other evil dudes fishing for money in the pot, leading to conflicts, shootouts, getaways-- Adriko runs over an African peasant on a hilltop road, blaming her for not watching the road more carefully. What's another life in Africa, even to an educated African?

Denis Johnson makes the point that this story centers on the shadowy world of post-9/11 scheming: "We talk about how the world has changed since the Twin Towers went down. I think you could easily say the part that's changed the most is the world of intelligence, security, and defense. The world powers are dumping their coffers into an expanded version of the old Great Game. The money's simply without limit, and plenty of it goes for snitching and spying. In that field, there's no recession." But there have always been types like Nair and Adriko, self-serving buccaneers with no loyalties and many frenemies.

Things get pretty messy and ugly in The Laughing Monsters (the title refers to some terrible mountains in remote Congo). Nair and Adriko are captured, interrogated, and then left to die in the jungle, where the novel gets really bizarre, into something so horrific that it seems more waking nightmare than a fight for survival. They end up in a village run by an obese witch-queen named La Dolce, who wears "a buzz-cut Afro on her hippopotamus head, eyes leaping from the sockets and eyelids like birds' beaks closing over them-- her mouth is tiny and round, but it opens to shocking hugeness, displaying many square white teeth." The groundwater is toxic, the peasants are starving, old men have no teeth, children are emaciated and dying and La Dolce is pronouncing this or that drivel while Adriko brandishes a machete and Nair pens sloppy letters to Davidia and an ex-girlfriend. By now, most readers will hardly care whether Nair and Adriko survive yet another quagmire and the climax thus feels more incoherent than terrifying. If I were to tell you (disappointingly) that the ending is a happy one, what would you think I mean? 

Pro-Youthful Indiscretions

"That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?"

This world, rolled up and put away, is the one of hard core hippie drug use from the late 1960s described so elegiacally in Denis Johnson's weird gem of a novel, Jesus Son. The novel (published in 1992, many years after the Woodstock Utopia dream puffed out its last cloud of highfalutin swag joy) is barely that: it's a collection of interconnected stories centering around the experiences of an unreliable narrator, never quite named, but known in some circles as Fuckhead. He scores drugs, makes out with girls, gets in trouble, works low-wage graveyard shifts, and hitchhikes around the Midwest. Our vision of ultra-sixties sinning rarely veers towards small town Kansas street corners, but the fact it does here makes the stories all the more special.

Besides the fact stories like "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and "Emergency" feature irresponsible narcotics use, Jesus Son is not for everyone due to its resistance to narrative conventions. It's about Fuckhead and his journey from young adult screwup to rehabilitating himself and getting a job and maybe a girlfriend. The prose is gorgeous, pointed, true, and epigrammatic. Describing his buddy on his court date: "He'd looked in his lawyer's eyes and fathomed it would be a short trial." Our narrator on leaving the TV on during casual sex: "But I was afraid to make love to her without the conversations and laughter from that false universe playing in our ears, because I didn't want to get to know her very well, and didn't want to be bridging any silences with our eyes." And Fuckhead on the diaspora of his drug buddies, either dying off or getting clean, but the good times as they knew them gone: "Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9am telling lies to one another, far from God."

Perhaps the best story in the collection does not concern drugs at all, but Fuckhead making a go at reality in suburban Arizona. His days are filled with Narcotics Anonymous meetings and he works at Beverly Home, a hospital for the aged and infirm, caring for patients whose deformities "made God look like a senseless maniac." Besides writing their monthly newsletter, he makes them feel human by sharing with them his smile, his charisma, and his capacity to listen. He dates a dwarf and later a cripple, meanwhile falling in love with a woman's mellifluous voice on his bus route. She sings in the shower and every day he stops to listen. He grows braver, risking more to see and hear. He realizes she and her husband are Mennonites, a conservative splinter group of Christianity famous for its Old World traditions. He spies her naked and hopes to catch her making love, but instead discovers the couple quarreling. It is nighttime and the woman flings the curtain aside with the narrator below on the other side of the window: "My face wasn't two feet from hers, but it was dark out and she could only have been looking at her own reflection, not at me... I thought I heard her weeping. I could have touched a teardrop, I stood that close." But the husband approaches her with contrition, offering to wash her feet and she for a moment resists accepting his move: "She didn't move for a while, not perhaps for a full minute, which seemed like a very long time to me outside in the dark with a great loneliness and the terror of a whole life not yet lived, and the TVs and garden sprinklers making the noises of a thousand lives never to be lived, and the cars going by with the sound of passage, movement, untouchable, uncatchable."

I suppose you call call Jesus Son a coming-of-age book. Youth is a folly but the great folly for the young might be not getting into enough trouble. "The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs." Perhaps we can learn about ourselves best while doing our worst. The poetry of youth is written in our errors. As important as an education is no one writes a beautiful song about straight A's. We have time enough to be wise and careful and if we're lucky, many years to look back. Perhaps the hero of Jesus Son took his sprint through the darkness a bit far, but his survival made him a better man. I've long traded on my own youthful catastrophes as good storytelling, having learned that while life gives and takes, you're often lucky enough for second chances. And what they say about sadness being integral to understanding happiness might hold true for the inner peace of growing old. It's possible that there is nothing truly to regret save for having not lived. Live and learn, your elders tell you. Truth.