#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon “Evolution…what's the next step-human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood-a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself…”

#favoritereadsof2025 #StoryGraph My war with William Kohler, the longest read of 2025.

#LastNight #JamesSalter -What is there to be rethought? Phil wanted to know… The deception, they said…she had been deceived all that time… - But that time was spent in happiness, wasn't it? Phil asked guilelessly. That's been lived. It can't be changed. It can't be just turned into unhappiness.

#favoritereadsof2025 1 The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell, translators 2 The Last Wolf by László Krasznahorkai George Szirtes, translator 3 Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright 4 JR by William Gaddis 5 Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson

Favorite reads of 2025, #15. #Schattenfroh #MichaelLentz “‘All things were made by him; / and without him was not any thing made that was made.’ What does that mean? The Word was there before God. Or: God was first within it, as Word….

My favorite reads of 2025, #14. “…so far removed from the world that he himself did not realize that his fierce struggle to exist twice was feeding the contrary suspicion that he was existing less and less, that he was lying in a lethargy...."

#EarlyWork #AndrewMartin She put her hand lightly on my shoulder. "I'm getting the sense this one fancies himself a real sophisticated type." "It's true," I said. "I only read books without stories."

My favorite reads of 2025, #13. #TheTunnel #WilliamHGass An ailing and distant father. "The bigot believes in details...So let me get to the teachings of my father...They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first….”

Favorite reads of 2025, 12th book. #MidnightlsNotinEveryonesReach #AntonioLoboAntunes “I came to say goodbye to my older brother, and through him, to myself...there are people who take a long time to leave us...like dogs who are abandoned in a remote place come back...humble….”

Finished #TheWomanintheDunes #KōbōAbe The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his colleagues…claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk....

Finished #TheInvertedWorld #ChristopherPriest “We've been cheating and stealing our way across this land, and it's that which has created the danger…We move across other people's land, we bargain for manpower…we take women…and all in order to keep the city moving." "The city can never stop," I said.

My favorite reads of 2025, 11th book. #MasonAndDixon #ThomasPynchon “Slaves...in another Colony…having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers...they're murdering and dispossessing thousands…passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers…Christ, Mason….

My favorite reads of 2025, 10th book. #TheMelancholyofResistance #LászlóKrasznahorkai “…his 'heart' was 'dead'...he no longer believed the world was 'an enchanted place' for the only power that really existed was 'that declared by force of arms'….

Finished #ConcreteIsland #JGBallard His relationships…all the thousand and one emotionally loaded transactions of his childhood, would have been tolerable if he had been able to pay for them in some neutral currency, hard cash across the high-priced counters of these relationships….

Finished #TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic,from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate,indifference to the power of their vote,loopholes, simple ignorance,this withdrawal was their own….

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 “And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature," said Mr Thoth, "and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me." "Your grandfather?" "No, my God."

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 “Look, you have to help me. Because I really think I am going out of my head." "You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman." "I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different," she pleaded. "But I'm not your enemy….”

Favorite reads of 2025, 9th book. #ThelnquisitorsManual #AntónioLoboAntunes "...please tell my idiotic son who doesn't know how to manage his affairs or take care of himself,a good-for-nothing,a washout,a kid who's afraid of the dark…tell my idiotic son that I may not have been but that…

#ConcreteIsland #JGBallard For years now he had re-mythologized his own childhood… a small boy playing endlessly by himself in a long suburban garden…Perhaps even his marriage to Catherine…had succeeded precisely because it recreated for him this imaginary empty garden.

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

My favorite reads of 2025, 8th book. #TheManWithoutQualities #RobertMusil “If it is the fulfillment of man’s primordial dreams to be able to fly…drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed…then present-day research is not only science but sorcery…

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering.

Favorite reads of 2025, 7th book #Worsted #GarielleLutz “I was living with a…older man...the poor guy had yet to find out that I had all along been overdoing it with a scathingly blond...I set limits,and then I cheat. It's darker in a room that has people in it than in one that doesn't."

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 Under the symbol she'd copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength…If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden…soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture…that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 “I don't know," she said,a little desperate. "Metzger,don't harass me. Be on my side." "Against whom?" inquired Metzger, putting on shades. "I want to see if there's a connection. I'm curious." "Yes, you're curious," Metzger said. “I’ll wait in the car….”

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 “Why are you walking around," inquired Oedipa, "with your eyes closed, Metzger?" "Larceny," Metzger said, "maybe they'll need a lawyer."

My favorite reads of 2025. 6th book. #Satantango #LászlóKrasznahorkai Futaki wakes to the sound of bells. "...and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin...eventually, to deliver himself...into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses….”

just want to say: goddamn missouri williams can write. you know the real thing when you encounter it.

#TheVivisectors #MissouriWilliams this omniscient presence would love me…with a cold, unwilling obsession…so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down…I was unable to imagine love without dominion….

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 “You one of these right-wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic Metzger. Fallopian twinkled. "They accuse us of being paranoids." "They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also. "Us?" asked Oedipa.

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 the central painting…a number of frail girls…prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void…the tapestry was the world. Oedipa…had stood in front of the painting and cried.

#TheWomanintheDunes #KōbōAbe One day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing more was ever heard of him.

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 She had looked down at her feet and known, then…that what she stood on had only been woven together…and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.

Schattenfroh: A Fable About Totalitarianism Written in Brain-Fluid An interview with the book’s author Michael Lentz and its translator, Max Lawton, about the German cult novel Schattenfroh thequietus.com/culture/book...

Finished #AnOralHistoryofAtlantis #EdPark A NOTE TO MY TRANSLATOR Page two...Why "knickers"? Page ten...Here you present a heated argument between two nuns (and are they truly robot nuns?), both of whom speak a weird amalgam of Cantonese and the International Morse Code. Can you help me? Please?

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 the sense of buffering…the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus…And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl…looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.

Favorite reads of 2025,5th book. #WittgensteinsMistress #DavidMarkson I did leave out this part before, about having taken lovers when I was still Adam's wife…one forgets whether one's husband had become drunk because one had done that,or if one had done that because one's husband had become drunk.

#TheCryingOfLot49 #ThomasPynchon #Pynchon25 …she wondered…shuttling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.

#Pynchon25 #Thomas Pynchon #TheCryingOfLot49 starting December 12th. #readinganactofsharedsolitude #paperpills🇵🇸❤️ #beedoubleokayess📚🐦 #reemreel #athingofbeauty www.instagram.com/reel/DSJRSBr...

#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon “Maybe capitalism decided it didn't need the old magic anymore."… "Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people's sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes."

My favorite reads of 2025. 4th book. #JR #WilliamGaddis -Our trip…to buy this share of America it is this company that makes things...baskets.Why nobody buys this baskets is there is this law...supply and decline passed by Congress consisting of three branches judicial executory and legislature...

My favorite reads of 2025. 3rd book. #Praiseworthy #AlexisWright “Once upon a fine time for some people in the world, but not so plenteous, nor perfect for others, there lived a culture dreamer obsessing about the era.”

My favorite reads of 2025. Second book. #TheLastWolf #LászlóKrasznahorkai because wherever he looked…there was that all-pervasive stench,the stench that was there because the last word, the word that comprehended the knowledge that futility and scorn…was coextensive with the world, was the world...

Finished #Underworld #DonDeLillo I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste. I don't know exactly what. He smiles…He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other…He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory….

#TheVivisectors #MissouriWilliams The most sublime act is to set another before you. -WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell Publication date: May 2026

#TheInvertedWorld #ChristopherPriest I HAD REACHED the age of six hundred and fifty miles. Beyond the door the guildsmen were assembling for the ceremony in which I would be admitted as a guild apprentice.…

Finished #HeartofDarkness #JosephConrad But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know…It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core….

Sale ends tonight at midnight. Just sayin.