Reading roundup

From best to worst...

Bosh and Flapdoodle
A.R. Ammons
The last collection of poetry by Ammons, whom I hadn't previously read. The jacket blurb from Harold Bloom says, "With John Ashbery and James Merrill, Ammons was the Sublime of his generation of American poets." Bloom should know, but what I would say is that I devoured this little collection in one sitting, and then returned to several for a second helping. Funny, jazzy, touching, and a lot more accessible than Ashbery. His "Aubade" opens with this:

They say, lose weight, change your lifestyle:
that's, take the life out of your style and 

the style out of your life: give up fats,
give up sweets, chew rabbit greens, raw: and 

how about carrots: raw: also, wear your
hipbones out walking: we were designed for 

times when breakfast was not always there, and
you had to walk a mile, maybe, for your first 

berry or you had to chip off a flint before
you could dig up a root...

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
The mother of all academic satires, and every bit as good as they say. I found it less nasty than I expected– Amis is surprisingly sympathetic to his characters, even the ones he skewers. Jim himself is a kick, often fantasizing the most appalling behavior but exhibiting only the mildly unacceptable, in part because he hasn't the gumption, in part because he's a good fellow after all. Needless to say he gets the girl. It reminded me of one of my other favorite books, Wonder Boys, which turns the story around and focuses on the washed-up old fart rather than the neurotic youngster.

Fatale
Jean-Patrick Manchette
A nasty piece of work about a nasty piece of work, it clocks in at 91 efficiently nasty and amusing pages. Good for a short plane ride.

The So Blue Marble
Dorothy B. Hughes
Her first novel. I've raved about a couple of her others, here and here. This one is an oddity, mostly an ode to Manhattan and a certain lifestyle. Despite the mounting body count, nobody seems terribly flustered. Readable, but clearly she improved with practice.

Dark Certainty
Dorothy B. Flanagan (Hughes)
Hughes's first published book (1931) was this volume of poetry, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. In my post about her awesome suspense novel In a Lonely Place, I implied that she must have been a pretty good poet. Wrong.