I think I’m just immune to 60s American paranoia. It’s all a conspiracy? The CIA did it? Corporations control the world? I’m just not that interested. The rhythm and wordplay is up my alley, of course. I’m excited for Mason & Dixon, which seems way more likely to grab me.

For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Interesting to see the ways in which it influenced Internet horror culture, but having grown up with that culture, there’s not much else to appreciate. The academic satire has been done better elsewhere, the typographical tricks are not interesting, and the Johnny sections are downright awful. I did revisit Blair Witch and read some old SCPs after, which was a better experience.

Three postmodern reimaginings (sequels?) of classic myths that have a sparkling creativity that puts the current trend of mythical retellings to shame. I found the first, on the 1001 Nights, clever and funny. The second, covering the post-heroic middle age of Perseus, was brilliant, a story I’ll be revisiting often. The third, on Bellerophon, was often incomprehensible, but had the usual cleverness from Barth that made it more than worthwhile.

For her part, she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitably show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childrearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable. Nor, mind, did she regard this perspective (which she applied as well to everything from vacation trips to historical movements) as spiritually negative or bleak: to affirm it was to affirm the antinomy of the cosmos, which antinomy she took to be not absurd contradiction but rich paradox, the pity and terror of the affirmation whereof effected in the human soul an ennobling catharsis.

The final book in an unofficial trilogy, including Vertigo and The Emigrants, this entry takes the form of a walking tour through Suffolk. Stylistically the most daring of the three, the narrator’s voice often collapses and merges with his subject, moving in and out of past and present tense as Sebald continues to develop his theme of memory and identity. My favourite thing about these three books is how past and present are not treated as distinct, with the past serving only to lead into the present and future. Instead, the past is placed on equal footing with the present. The people who lived there are equally significant and worthy of our time and attention.

On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room. Years ago, Janine had been obliged by the ever-increasing masses of paper on her desk to bring further tables into use, and these tables, where similar processes of accretion had subsequently taken place, represented later epochs, so to speak, in the evolution of Janines paper universe.

Vologda, he wrote in summer 1863 to his Zagórski cousins, is a great three-verst marsh across which logs and tree trunks are placed parallel to each other in crooked lines; the houses, even the garishly painted wooden palaces of the provincial grandees, are erected on piles driven into the morass at intervals. Everything round about rots, decays and sinks into the ground. There are only two seasons: the white winter and the green winter. For nine months the ice-cold air sweeps down from the Arctic sea. The thermometer plunges to unbelievable depths and one is surrounded by a limitless darkness. During the green winter it rains week in week out. The mud creeps over the threshold, rigor mortis is temporarily lifted and a few signs of life, in the form of an all-pervasive marasmus, begin to manifest themselves. In the white winter everything is dead, during the green winter everything is dying.

It only took a few pages before I was ordering everything by Barth I could get my hands on. A postmodern satire of 18th and 19th century adventure novels (shades of Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and many more) where the backstabs and double-crosses are so numerous that the hapless protagonist questions reality, and the reader wonders whether Barth always had the destination in mind while building his maze. Of course, as with so many of my favourite authors from Vonnegut to Heller, the joke is that it doesn’t matter.

There is a real critique of the founding myth of America here, if you’re willing to dig it out. but most of the time, I was just satisfied with the precise comedic prose and rambling Tristram Shandy-esque digressions.

Ebenezer hesitated. “Tis a great step.” “Tis a great world,” replied Burlingame.

The second was his age: whereas most of his accomplices were scarce turned twenty, Ebenezer at the time of this chapter was more nearly thirty, yet not a whit more wise than they, and with six or seven years’ less excuse.

“What have I said, but that thou art human?” Ebenezer sighed. “Tis quite enough.”

I last read this when I was ten or so, on a third-hand copy with the pages falling out. I was vacuuming up fantasy mega-novels at the time, but for some reason I never got farther than the first. Maybe because most of the conflict is mental, and our brave heroes spend most of the time running away. I liked it better as an adult, though only as a treadmill audiobook. I’ll always prefer earnest and serious prose to the winking irony of most modern fantasy.

Two days’ hunger made a fine sauce for anything.

There is a different beauty in simplicity, in a single line placed just so, a single flower among the rocks. The harshness of the stone makes the flower more precious.

The murder of a village witch is explored through the perspectives of the townspeople, part Rashomon, part Anatomy of a Murder. I had high expectations, but after recent readings of Bolaño, Lentz, and others, I’m a little burned out by brutal explorations of the violence inherent in the system. There are passages in here so angry and venomous it feels like the author is spitting them onto the page, and I couldn’t find enough humanity in any of the characters to pull me through. I think that makes it a success, but not one I was ready for. I think it’s on me to do a better job spacing out the truly dark stuff.

The third section focuses on Ambros Adelwarth, the stoic German traveling companion of a rich American gentleman of the early 1900s, is one of the most quietly stunning tragedies I’ve ever read. The word “quiet” always comes to mind when I think about Sebald, because the prose is subdued and serves the story so expertly that I’m often swept along without noticing the expert hand that is doing the sweeping. But when I remind myself to stop and look closer, Sebald (and of course, the translator Michael Hulse) can turn a phrase with the best of them.

Since mid May 1969 - I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years- I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective.

I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.

A ghostly love story, with a touch of nightmare. The repeating sentences mirror the recurring fate of father, son, and grandson. Can anyone escape the shadow of their parents? If we read more autobiographically, is an artist able to provide the life their loved ones need?

This one didn’t land for me. The shifting, slippery prose just left me nothing to hang onto, and the plot was neither ambiguous enough to leave me with questions nor straightforward enough to provide the answers. Read Morning and Evening instead.

My first encounter with Sebald was this strange, looping semi-fictional travelogue. Prose so simple and clear that sometimes I overlooked its elegance and precision. I knew little going in, and so I didn’t realize the depth of the reflections on time and memory until the final third. Even when I didn’t know where I was being led, it was clear from the deft imagery and wistful melancholy that it was somewhere worth going.

The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

The staff, remarkably restrained as they appeared, had a way of setting down the glasses, saucers and ashtrays on the marble surface with such vehemence, it seemed they were determined to all but shatter them. My cappuccino was served, and for a moment I felt that having achieved this distinction constituted the supreme victory of my life.

A tour through the religious, societal, and political context of the years of Shakespeare’s life. Most of the biographical details were new to me, although a healthy amount of speculation is needed to connect them directly to the plays. I was most interested in the hidden references to religious conflict, which due to fears of censorship and persecution were so well buried that it takes a scholarly guide to reveal them to me.

Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.