The Deuce: Currently reading the most recent Dungeon Crawler Carl book

It was strange, but good. It had a ton going on, with a lot of ideas and early experimentation with a sort of magical realism, and beautiful writing and vignettes. But I ultimately thought it didn’t have enough of either involving plot ir fully realized characters to elevate it from good to great.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene was very good. Was very close to the kind of books John Le Carre wrote. Not as good plot wise as the best Le Carre, but better from a writing and character perspective. (Not that Le Carre is bad in those aspects, but he’s not Graham Greene.)

Also read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Like most Pulitzer Prize winning novels I’ve read, it was perfectly good, but nowhere near the raves and incredible critical blurbs would lead you to believe. I didn’t really get the raves about this one. Perfectly fine, but not amazing.

On the negative side, just finished the Wings of the Dove by Henry James, which was a big disappointment. I’d read Portrait of a Lady which I thought was great, and Washington Square which I thought was really good, and thought maybe my dislike of James was based on having been forced to read him when too young. But this one was a dud. Just so involuted—he got so wrapped up in trying to convey these incredibly subtle emotional and mental shifts during conversations that he completely lost the plot—it was so obscure it was hard to actually get a sense of the characters, and the plot slowed yo a crawl. He didn’t miss the forest for the trees, he missed the forest for the veins on the back of the leaves on the trees.

And finally, Miss Lonelyhearts which was horrible in many ways. It was incredibly, shockingly misogynistic as a starter. I almost stopped on page 4 when the narrator went into a bar and listened in on a conversation of other reporters about how the female reporters starting to enter the field should be gang raped to show them their place. But it was only 50 pages, so I wasted another hour or two slugging through this POS. Aside from the sexism, it reads as if Holden Caulfield grew up and narrated his life without becoming any less of a reprehensible asshole, but did it in an over the top tough guy noir fiction style. One of the worst books I’ve ever read. I am baffled how it even became labeled a minor classic. It sucks so much. Major edit update: the last book mentioned was actually Miss Lonelyhearts, not Day of the Locust. I picked up a single volume that had both novellas by Nathaniel West, planning to read both. But the one I read was such garbage that no way was I going to read the other one.

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Sound super-niche, but the writing is excellent and it gives a great picture of a society where a lot of the trends that later coalesced into modernism were percolating.

I also read The River and the Gauntlet by SLA Marshall which was a really low level narrative of the US 8th army experience during the initial Chinese counterattack in Korea. Was good, but very intentionally down in the weeds (literally), with chapters covering events mostly at the small unit level. Worked since this battle was so fragmented due to terrain and lack of communication.

Also read Thinking, Fast and Slow, which was excellent, about how the human brain actually works, and all the shortcuts your mind takes to interpret things and form judgments.

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I've recently been enjoying this light little page-turner that's made a lot of Non-fiction bests of 2026 so far.

Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945

No idea how much Goebbels banned dancing, then allowed it, then banned it, then allowed it only on Tues-Thurs, then banned it again....it was like the pastor in Footloose but significantly more evil.