Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

While working on an “account” of a trip to New Orleans last weekend, I’d like to report that I really liked Louise Erdrich’s newest, Shadow Tag. It was dark and sad, and very well done — as you would expect from Louise Erdrich. I liked, also, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, a story of a year in the life of one battalion in Irag, beginning at the start of the Surge. Finkel is very good here. He writes well, without calling attention it. You cannot stop reading. I very much liked Joshua Ferris’s second novel The Unnamed. The critics, many of them — predictably!  –  savaged it, perhaps because Ferris tried to get out of the box. Or perhaps because the story resists an easy summation. Whatever the case, I liked it — even better than Ferris’s first. I liked Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust because of Waugh’s stylistic prowess and also because I did not see that ending coming. A comic masterpiece. Poor Tony. I like Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Finfold less so, but I still will finish it. I read Sam Lipsyte’s next, The Ask, and I thought it had a lot going for it, a whole lot, but I can’t decide if the second half was as good as the first half. I’m inclined to say it wasn’t. And finally I liked, and laughed a lot throughout, James Hynes’s next, Next; I think it one of the best — since Updike did it –  to utilize Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom mode. Hynes manages to make the Updike voice his own, or at least by enough. And the ending, yes, the ending, as promised in the blurbs, is a shocker.

That’s all for now, except …

Just now on WWOZ out of New Orleans, this chestnut by the great (and here very young) Brenda Lee: