The Reading Room Feb '25

stuff what i've been reading

Photo by Debrocke/ClassicStock/Getty Images

Books read:
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
The Horse by Willy Vlautin

Books reading:
Appendix N by various writers
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson

I’ve discovered that a marvelous way to pass the time while your country’s democracy gets shredded by a TV grifter and his billionaire edgelord master is to get lost in a book! Here are a few that have been keeping my company in the recent weeks.

A strange thing occurred recently: a discussion of books came up with my friend Amy at a holiday party we hosted in December. She had recently read Daniel Mason’s North Woods and loved it. Loved it so much, in fact, that she went out to her car and grabbed her copy — which she apparently was just carrying with her wherever she went — and gave it to me. I feel like if someone is moved to give you their copy of a beloved book, and one that they carry in their car to holiday parties, you should reciprocate. A little bit later, someone brought up Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams; Amy had not read it. I, a little tipsy, marched to the bookshelf and retrieved our little hardcover edition and gave it to her. The exchange was made. The next day, I felt a little sad. Train Dreams is the kind of book that you want to live permanently on your shelf, ready at a moment’s notice to be brought down and ingested. And here I’d given ours away. It so happened that on the very day that I was regretting my charitable contribution to Amy’s literary (and life) betterment, a package arrived from our friend Jon Klassen. It was a copy of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. This had arrived totally out of the blue and unsolicited. Kismet! I immediately dropped everything and re-read it. It is as good as the first time I read it — maybe better! I think it may be the closest thing I know to a perfect book. If you have not read it, you should read it immediately. It’s a shorty; I recommend putting aside an afternoon/evening and reading it one go.

Speaking of slim novels that are best read in a single shot, I recently tore through Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Readers of the Reading Room will know that Keegan is a recent favorite of mine — her name has popped up more than once in these little missives. I loved Foster quite a bit and Small Things did not disappoint — her writing is so spare and lovely, you tend to get carried along by it. I couldn’t put the thing down. It’s about a coal merchant in 1980s Ireland and his discovery of abuses at a local convent. It gets a little dark, but Keegan’s treatment of her characters are so tender. She’s got a good thing going, I think, making these little chapbooks that feel like entire worlds, so rich despite their brevity.

I’m trying to recall what drove me to read this 20th century behemoth, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I think it might’ve occurred to me, after some discursive youtubing and watching the famous Mailer/Vidal spar on Dick Cavett’s TV show, that I’d never read anything by this guy who described himself as the Muhammad Ali of American novelists. This novel, his first, shows up pretty regularly on those best-of-the-twentieth-century lists that get unfurled every once in a while. Figured I’d give it a shot. I liked it pretty well! Felt a little rangy at times, could’ve used a maybe more exacting editor, but I can see how it caused a furor when it was first published. This uncensored examination of the modern military, I think, paved the way for every war novel that followed and drew heavily on the ones that came before it — Mailer was famous for saying that he saw The Naked and the Dead as the modern American War and Peace. Mailer’s publisher was apparently shocked by the amount of profanity in the original draft; Mailer sidestepped this censorship by changing all of the “fucks” to “fugs.” I found it really strange — and I’m not the only one — and I was a little surprised, in this age of re-evaluating old novels in the light of our updated sensibilities, that an edition of the novel with all the fucks put back in does not exist. I suppose it’s kept intact because it has just become part of the novel’s fabric. It’s how The Fugs got their name, after all.

I loved Tony Tulathimutte’s totally batshit interconnected short story collection Rejection. I laughed out loud several times reading it, something that feels fairly rare, even with ostensibly funny books. I think this book is something really special and that Tulathimutte is kind of a genius. Not for the faint of heart, though. You’ll want to delete your browser history once you’re done looking up all the references in the book.

Willy Vlautin is a national treasure — a pacific northwest treasure, for sure. One comes to a new Willy Vlautin novel like one comes to a new album by The Cure or Swans. It’s going to be a grim experience. And yet with every Vlautin novel, there’s always a glimmer of hope that the hardluck character that centers the novel will have things work out for them — and it’s that glimmer of hope that carries you, breathlessly, through the pages. Of course, Willy’s too good of a writer and storyteller to give you that satisfaction. But there is always *some kind* of redemption in these stories, you just have to look for it. In The Horse, that hardluck central character is a depressive aging songwriter who wonders if his best years are behind him, which is not something *I* would relate to ahem. I typically cringe when novelists try to nail the process of songwriting or the experience of muddling one’s way through the less-traveled roads of the music industry — it’s so rarely done with any kind of realness or authenticity — but Willy, coming from a background as the singer and songwriter in the band Richmond Fontaine, is a total outlier here. He manages to paint a portrait of the southwestern casino-tour circuit that feels startlingly real.

As for my current reading stack, I’ll be brief: Appendix N is a collection of the stories that are cited in the first edition of the D&D Dungeon Master’s guide as the ur-texts of the roleplaying game as it was being developed. It’s all early to mid-twentieth century pulpy fantasy from the likes of Lovecraft and Moorcock. So good. I picked up Patrick Raden Keefe’s history of the Sackler family, Empire of Pain, on Libro.fm (read by the author) after seeing the very great documentary about Nan Golden All The Beauty and the Bloodshed. You can stream that on Max. Go to it. Jon Raymond gifted me a copy of The Long Ships, saying it was the only book about vikings that made him laugh out loud. High praise, indeed!

Til next time, valued Machinists! Feel free to fugging chime in the fugging comments about whatever books are floating your fugging boats these days.