My Weeks of Reading, Writing and No Relaxation

When the books (including ones that don't yet exist) take over.

I’ve written here before that my philosophy about owning books, both physical and electronic, is to make sure I have access to a library that gives me options for any occasion. If I want to read realistic fiction, I want to have some to choose from. If I want surrealism, comedy or postmodern, I need options. My biggest regrets are when authors cannot supply new material. I could read a Douglas Adams book a year if we weren’t so stupid as to let such people die.

At the moment, I am in a particularly wild reading phase, the result of books purchased long ago and waiting, new autumn releases, a few books found in our building’s laundry room and a personal quest to get to know our latest Nobel Prize in Literature winner. The books I’m reading all at once are very different from one another but each captivating, inspiring and entertaining.

This is all coinciding with a writing phase and a fast growing creative project that might make The Middlebrow a little less regular for a while. But, I want to discuss all of the books I am reading because they’re all great or at least inspiring. before we get to that, I accompanied The Artist/Scholar Wife to a show celebrating Women: Annie Leibowitz, a two-volume 2025 edition of her photo portraits. At the pop-up exhibit, we met and briefly spoke with novelist and author Salman Rushdie.

Photo by Natasha Gural.

Rushdie is a hero to me because of his bravery in the face of a global call for his execution dating back to the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses in 1988. At great risk to himself, Rushdie spoke up for writers and artists, even as he lived for many years in hiding or under watchful security. He befriended important and provocative journalists like Christopher Hitchens and he never compromised about the rights of people to tell their truths and to speak their minds. In August 2022, Rushdie, who is now 78 years old, was stabbed in the face by a 24-year old fanatic trying to make good on a 44-year-old religious demand that somebody execute the author. I am happy to say that Rushdie seems in great physical form, is spry and friendly and was very gracious when I told him that it’s a gift to see him healthy and participating in public life.

As it happens, I have finally started reading The Satanic Verses. For years I was told that its controversy would not speak to me and that the people speaking out against the book were caught up in intricacies of Islam that I wouldn’t find interesting. But, I finally cracked this novel and from the first chapter, it is a cosmic and comic delight with a timeless magical realism that I’m looking forward to spending more time with.

The arrival of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket really set off my reading spree. The book came to me a few weeks after we watched One Battle After Another, the divisive Paul Thomas Anderson movie inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. A few words on this — I liked One Battle, and I also liked Vineland, which flummoxed critics when it came out in 1990. I think of Vineland like a Velvet Underground album that doesn’t appeal to everybody but does appeal to artists. I find it hard to imagine that Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies don’t owe something to Vineland and am not surprised to see that PTA was inspired by it. My only criticism is that Anderson changed the character names in his story, which is fine, but when you have an actor named Chase Infiniti in your cast and you’re working in the Pynchon style, just use her real name, man!

Shadow Ticket is about a former strikebreaker turned private detective, hired to find the whereabouts of the missing daughter of a man known as Wisonsin’s “Al Capone of Cheese.” It’s a hard-boiled story, rich with language and full of ridiculous plot elements, like prohibition-era bootleggers running whiskey from Canada in a stolen German U-boat that they somehow got into Lake Michigan and a Hungarian magician named Dr. Zoltan von Kiss who can make objects disappear at will. Our hero Hicks is almost assassinated by a paid of Italian hitmen dressed as elves. Then, he’s drugged and Shanghai’d to Hungary, where he picks up the trail of the missing cheese heiress. A lot’s been written about this novel and its literary quality. I am a fan. The only observation I have that I have not seen elsewhere is this: In 1941, while exiled to Finland, Bertolt Brecht wrote a play called The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which satirized Adolf Hitler’s rise to power through the tale of a Chicago mafioso who controlled the cauliflower trade during Prohibition. There’s something to me that rhymes about these two ideas, especially the relationship between fascism and organized crime and the impulse of tyrants to control people by controlling food.

Both Rushdie and Pynchon seem to be dealing with something like realism+, and this is also true of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, published to great acclaim in 2018. It’s a stunning novel with some great comedy in it along with an obvious sense of doom, as it is set in New York City in 2000, leading right up to the 9/11 attacks.

While reading the Pynchon, I found a copy of The Possessed by Albert Camus. It’s a theatrical adaptation of Fyodor’s Dostoevsky’s novel, which Camus had read in French translation. The novel is considered one of Dostoevsky’s four major works, and is better know these days as The Demons. It’s a story about nihilism during a time of political upheaval and it’s a morality tale at the same time, that is also very funny. Reading it in dramatic form really brings out how influential it is, especially on the films of Woody Allen (Love & Death, on the lighter side and Crimes and Misdemeanors, more weightily).

Speaking of, I read Woody Allen’s novel what’s with baum? and reviewed it in full for The Washington Independent Review of Books. My quick take here is that the novel, which was originally intended as either a play or movie, really does please the fan who regrets that Allen is no longer able to finance and distribute a new film every year, as he has for most of his career. Good and related news is that City of Madrid is helping to finance a new Woody Allen production set there, so we have that to look forward to.

I am also finally reading Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks who is both a writer about comedy and a comedy writer. This book is a collection of interviews with comedy writers, from network television to Monty Python and beyond. It’s a delight and a pleasure to see how many successful comedy writers remain inspired by Allen and his career.

To keep up with the academic work of The Renaissance Son, I read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and then couldn’t help but to read the sequel Antony and Cleopatra. Halfway through “The Roman Plays” I figured I shouldn’t stop and read Coriolanus. That’s a later Shakespeare tragedy that’s really on the level of Hamlet, King Lear or Macbeth. I think it’s especially relevant now because it’s a play about a warrior king who cannot turn off his aggression and battlefield pride to serve Rome’s many citizens, including a powerful political class and the fickle masses under their influence. Coriolanus earns his name by conquering Rome’s enemies, almost single-handedly, in the city of Corioles. But for his bravery and butchery he expects total obedience to his will at home, something his society is not willing to give up to him. It’s really a story about how a person’s character is revealed, not improved by power. I’ll leave to you to consider why I think that matters in 2025.

I rounded this up with Titus Andronicus, which is one of Shakespeare’s first plays, though set in many years after the events of Antony & Cleopatra. It’s based on a popular story from the time, about a Roman general who loses 20 of 24 sons fighting off the Goths, installs a rival as emperor and becomes embroiled in an escalating feud of vengeance and cruelty that sees a woman raped, her hands chopped off and her tongue cut from her mouth, the criminals behind it murdered and fed to their father and all sorts of other bloody cruelties. It’s a “revenge play” in the Spanish style and it’s bad! The writing is actually bad!

Like, here’s a character talking about Lavinia, after she has lost here hands and tongue: “O, that delightful engine of her thoughts, That blabbed them with such pleasing eloquence, Is torn from forth that pretty hollow cage Where, like a sweet melodious bird, it sung Sweet varied notes, enchanting every ear.”

To bring this full semicircle, I’ve also made some time for László Krasznahorkai, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. I’m reading the book Chasing Homer, which is a unique, multimedia novella about a man who is being stalked through Hungary by assassins bent on his destruction. This relates both to Rushdie’s plight for decades and to Pynchon’s story about a midwestern detective who finds himself in Hungary. The book is broken into short narrative monologues, each accompanied by a QR code that leads you to a a music score by Hungarian jazz drummer Miklós Szilveszter, along with paintings by Germany’s German painter Max Neumann. The prose is translated with great dramatic energy by John Batki.*

There’s a parallel here to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, also about an everyman beset by irresistible, lethal and inexplicable forces. Krasznahorkai has famously said, “When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.” But I am also reminded of Peter Handke’s theatrical works and Samuel Beckett’s prose (especially in More Pricks Than Kicks).

That brings us through what I have read, or am reading, right now. Your Name Here by Helen deWitt and Ilya Gridneff is on deck, as is The Secret History by Donna Tartt, another one I seem to have missed over the years. For some reason, I am drawn back towards Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. There are biographies of Mondrian and Duchamp to be read, and the letters of Anne Sexton and it seems George Saunders has something in mind for us all in 2026.

Happy reading, friends. I’ve also got to find time to write…

*As you’ll see in the comments below, I mixed up the names of the translator and painter. I corrected it on November 8, 2025, one day after posting.