What I Read in June 2026 – I don’t know, that’s all words, never wake, all words, there’s nothing else

Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something.  Some notes on books I read in the distant past.

NOT SHAKESPEARE

The Dutch Courtesan (1604), John Marston – Discussed long ago.

Poems (1594-1612), George Chapman – A superb, innovative poet, somehow an Ovidian and an anti-Ovidian, attracted to but also shocked by human sensuality, which may be a good part of why he had much presence for a long time.  I mean, compare to sexy John Donne.  Please see Chapman’s long poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) for a demonstration.  There is the other problem – rather than write sonnets and epigrams and other things we, for some sense of we, still like to read, he wrote long, complex philosophical about aesthetics.

FICTION

The Unnamable (1953), Samuel Beckett – The fragment in the post’s title is from the last page.

Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Evelyn Waugh – The second volume of Waugh’s trilogy about World War II, including a long account of the defense and retreat from Crete that is especially good, although the earlier scenes of pointless training on a remote Scottish island are outstanding in an older Wavian comic vein.  Put Out More Flags (1942), written immediately after the Cretan disaster, stills looks to me like the greater work of art.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Shirley Jackson – A neurotic young woman puts herself in an environment, nominally a haunted house, perfectly made to maximize her neuroses.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Not much of a reader of ghost stories, I long ago was surprised by how often they are comic, so it was not surprising when, about two-thirds in, this ghost story takes a huge comic swerve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970), George V. Higgins – Checking in with my neighbors in Boston.

Nine Princes in Amber (1970), Roger Zelazny – Something I should have read when I was ten years-old, but I do not remember ever seeing a copy.  Superhero heroic fantasy.

A History of the Afircan-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond (as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid) (2004), Percival Everett & James Kincaid – That title (which is accurate).  It sounds like a satire of the racial politics of twenty years ago, but is really mostly a satire of publishing twenty years ago, and for both the jokes are either outdated or timeless; I am not sure.  It’s the funniest Evertt novel I have read so far.

 

SOMEHOW NOT FICTION

No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1953), Felice Benuzzi –  An Italian prisoner of war in Kenya is so bored that he and some pals break out of prison, climb a mountain, and then break back into prison.  Benuzzi eventually writes this marvelous book about crazy people, and becomes an important Italian diplomat.

 

POETRY

Pleasing the Diners (86-103), Martial, tr. R. L. Barth – Barth has been working on Martial for decades, his whole life as a poet.  These are the ones he thinks he got to work.  They do work. 

The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), James Merill

The Boy in the Well and Other Poems (1995), Daniel Mark Epstein – I read a poem in a magazine and then went to see what my library had.  Smart formal allusive poems.

 

ARTY

Research (2025), Charles Fort

Library of the Paranormal (2025), Jackie Gleason – More art book esoterica.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

A Sereia Verde (The Green Mermaid, 1941), Dinah Silveira de Queiroz – Short stories by an author famous in Brazil for at least a couple of stories (not these) that have had multiple film and television adaptations.  A bit melodramatic for my tastes.  The title novella is about a pair of cousins who, competing for the affections of their grandmother, develop a lifelong conflict.  Or perhaps the one just hates the other.  The title refers to a sublime moment when the protagonist learns that a dream-like childhood memory was actually in some sense real.  Best part of the book.

Le square (1955), Marguerite Duras – Two characters on a park bench discuss the meaning of life.  Mostly dialogue.  Dry.  I find it dry.

Les trésors de la mer Rouge (The Treasures of the Red Sea, 1971), Romain Gary – A tiny little travel book to Djibouti and then Yemen.  The Yemen trip is mostly filler, but at that point Djibouti was the last bit of colonial French Africa, governed by Dominique Ponchardier, among other unlikely things author of dozens of spy novels starring “The Gorilla,” so there is a lot for Gary to do.  He visits the future setting of Beau Travail (Denis, 1999), for example.

Next month, meaning this month: more of the same.