I should have liked this novel, but I didn't. It's Joycean, rowdy, raunchy, and reckless but the protagonist is not amusing. At best, he's a cad and a leech. He seemed violent and misogynistic to me. All the wit in the world can't smooth that over. I did like the Mary character (shades of Houellebecq's "heroines") but Sebastian rides roughshod over her (and everyone else).

*** "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." The title hardly prepares you for this bleak novel about five lonely loners whose paths intersect. One character experiences true love, but wait until you meet his beloved...

*** you don't think of aphorisms when you think of proust, but his recherche is studded with them...yet another example of how people have an idea of an author that has nothing to do with the actual experience of reading their works (e.g. Kafka is not Kafkaesque)

*** great novella...capote has the light touch

**** great novel...he outcormacs McCarthy

** i like this guy's novels...mysterious, Kawabata-like, almost fairy tales...this one is about a writer who stops writing...satisfying, deep conclusion

*** very well written, funny...midlife ambivalence of a graphic artist at a summer art camp for grownups

*** very good novel...in the patricia lockwood category

Frumkin's adventures in middle-brow land. Not to be mean-spirited, but this book creaked from beginning to end. Unpersuasive characters, style trying too hard to be clever, and endless scenes in airplanes that made me never want to travel again. This book makes Truman Capote look like Tolstoy. Speaking of which, back to War and Peace (I'm on page 273, the battle of Austerlitz), which features a regiment dog named Zhuchka, the same name as the dog in Brothers Karamazov. Must be a Fido/Rover kind of thing. Look for a Labradoodle named Zhuchka in Prospect Heights at some point in the future.

**** great short stories--reminiscent of flannery o'connor

* experimental novel, very weird; did not cotton to themes of death, grief, the afterlife

***** third time through...one of the best

***** great book on evolution, sexual selection, birds as artists

*** quirky and memorable memoir by excellent poet

** not a bad novel...elena ferrante-like...grum view of marriage

I started out enjoying this chatty, iconoclastic memoir, but as I waded into its 308 pages, I started to believe less and less of her story and to feel more and more like I had been Shanghaied by some kind of ADHD pathological liar, phoney, and con artist. She is often careless about details and the seams show. She remains throughout a journalist, voyeur, freeloader, spy, mole. I do not like you Bianca Bosker.

**** great knife porn

**** always interesting; mostly about memes; worth reading

**** interesting book by a philosopher on octopuses and consciousness

**** fairy tale meets waiting for godot