Thank you for poking around this compendium of notes, impressions, and recommendations based on one reader’s reading experiences. Below, there’s an archive of recent posts, with the newest appearing first, that may help you find something good to read if you’re among the few who still spend time in solitary silence engaged in a text-based interactive imaginative experience.
(Note: the URL “litfunforever.com” refers to literary fundamentalism, ie, belief in literature’s ability to elaborate the natural complexity of life and oppose us-versus-them ideologies as well as reductive and often character-restricted assertions of all stripes. It also suggests good-natured evangelical elevation of reading and writing until the end of time. 🤘 )
- The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Revelation of the Structure and Decategorization in the Age of the Holy Spirit
- Mirrors Express the Room: What Was “Autoportraiture”?
- Great Novelists in Great Novels by Great Novelists?
- Winner of the Award for Book That Most Exceeded Expectations in 2023
- The Wolves of Eternity: Prequel to an Infinite Arc
- Brief Impressions of Every Tomas Espedal Publication Available in English Translation So Far
- Summer “Days Between” Reading About The Dead and Related Wonders of Nature
- Textual Supplementary Extension to Long-Ass Audio Appearance on the Beyond the Zero Podcast Show
- Eye of Sauron, Turn to Me: Obligatory Composition of Unnecessary Content to Post on Internet and Promote on Social Media to Raise Awareness of Forthcoming Publication
- Announcing Imminent Availability of A NEW SHORT NOVEL by Owner & Operator of this Domain
- The Magus by John Fowles: The Individualized Education Program (IEP) of Cruelty
- All Aboard the Bloated Boat: Arguments in Favor of Barry Bonds
- Dag Solstad: Ironic Ambiguity and the Audacity of the Unremarkable
- Official Short List for Best Book Read Award 2021 Edition Extraordinaire
- New Novels From Knausgaard (The Morning Star) and Franzen (Crossroads): Subtitle Subject to Change Regarding Middle-Aged Male Writers Every Middle-Aged Male Reader Reads
- Sesshu Foster’s ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines and Atomik Aztek: Reconstruction of the Dream of the Fable of the Deconstruction of the Meaning of America or Something Like That
- Just Wanted to Say I’m Really Looking Forward to Matthew McIntosh’s Third Novel After “TheMystery.doc” and “Well”
- Our Holiday Shopping Guide to the Lesser Knausgaard: The Essays, the Soccer One, the Short Lecture, the Munch One . . . Which Is Right for You?
- A Cosmology Against the Void: Reading and Re-reading DeLillo During Global Pandemic Summer 2020
- Neutral Evil )))
- Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
- Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann: Your Typical Crazee Extruder Contractor Red-State Femme Soliloquy With Intermittent Conventional Sympathetic Mountain Lion Action
- Alpha Soloists Extraordinaire: A Little Bit About the Beta in Print by Phillppe Petit, Alex Honnold, and Tommy Caldwell
- Could You Please Name Some Novels That Are Stylized and Weird, With an Edge of Violence, But Also Generally Entertaining?
- Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski: Love, Hate, Life, Death, Joy, Sorrow, Sex, Solitude, Work, Play, War, Peace, Life on Earth and the Afterlife, the Life of the Body and Life of the Mind
- Winner of the Award for Best Novel I Read in 2018 (A Time to Love and a Time to Die), Plus A Bit About Three Other Novels by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, and A Night in Lisbon)
- The Archquaquaversalist Text: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Winner of the Award for the Most Admirable or Most Memorable or Most “Best” Novel I Read in 2017: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
- The Possibility of a Politically Incorrect Provocateur: Impressions of Almost Everything by Michel Houellebecq Available in English Translation
- The Avengers: A Jewish War Story by Rich Cohen
- Another Acronym of American Fiction: MFA – NYC + FTE = ?
- Zweig Versus the ZZs of Existence (Chess Story, The World of Yesterday, The Struggle with the Daemon, Confusion, Journey Into the Past, and Montaigne)
- Thomas Bernhard and the Comedy of Contempt: Leeching the Seething in One Long Paragraph
- Four Great Books by Julien Gracq, Supreme Prose Poet of Anticipatory Anxiety: A Balcony in the Forest, The Opposing Shore, The Shape of a City, and King Cophetua
- Just Wanted to Say I’m Really Looking Forward to Hanya Yanagihara’s Third Novel After “A Little Life” and “The People in the Trees”
- Give Us This Day Our Quotidian Pain: An Open Letter to David Foster Wallace About His Last Novel Manuscript, “The Pale King”
- The Dynamic Duo of Mathias Énard and Charlotte Mandell Have Done Some Damn Fine Work So Far: Zone, Street of Thieves, and Compass
- Supply + Demand + Magic: Notes from a 2008 First Read Posted in Advance of the Tenth Anniversary of the Publication of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- Transversals, Aeroplanes, Grandmothers, and Inverts: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The Complete My Struggle Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- The Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Angels & Demons at Play: A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- As Good As It Gets: The Four Major Thomas Mann Novels in the Recent John E. Woods Translations (Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, Joseph & His Brothers)
- A Good Samurai Will Parry the Blow: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Erring on the Side of Heft: My Struggle Book Six by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- News
And then there’s an alphabetized list of categories:
- 18th C.
- 19th C.
- 20th C.
- 21st C.
- American
- Archipelago
- Associative
- Atrocity Exhibition
- Austrian
- Bernhardian
- Bolaño
- British
- Cold War
- Comedy
- Contemporary
- DFW
- Elaborated Bible
- Essay
- European
- Fantastic
- French
- FSG
- German Language
- Helen DeWitt
- Holocaust
- Intertextual
- Intertexual
- Jewish
- Knausgaard
- Long review
- Major Reference Works
- Mann
- MFA
- Misanthropic
- Modern Library
- New Directions
- news
- non-fiction
- Norwegian
- NYC
- NYRB
- One paragraph
- Open Letter
- Penguin Random House
- Peri-WWII
- Philosophical
- Polish
- Post-identity
- Proust
- Pushkin Press
- Review
- Ripped from the Headlines
- Russian
- Self-promotional BS
- Structural
- Stylist
- Supernatural
- Terrorism
- Theological
- TLA
- Tolstoy
- Translation
- Uncategorized
- Zweig