I read fewer books in 2017 than I have in years, and wrote a lot less on this blog than in the past. There are (uninteresting) reasons. There were lots of books and films that I wish I’d written about—maybe I’ll squeeze them into a post in the next week—but for now, mostly as a means of archiving and organizing (and a reminder to update the reviews page), these are the longer things I wrote on this blog this year (and, uh, some roosters):
A review of Ishmael Reed’s Christmas satire, The Terrible Twos
Not a review of Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language
Eddie Campbell’s canon of great graphic novels, 1977-2001
On Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death
A review of Gisèle Prassinos’s collection of surreal anti-fables, The Arthritic Grasshopper
A riff on rereading Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons condenses myth into vibrant narco noir
Not a review of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian
On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about storytelling
A quick note on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog
Let me recommend Antonio di Benedetto’s overlooked novel Zama
Helen DeWitt’s novel Lightning Rods just wasn’t for me
A review of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed’s syncretic Neo-HooDoo revenge Western
A review of Robert Coover’s excellent new novel Huck Out West
Biblioklept 