the lathe of heaven

Backs up its wonderful title by being a wonderful story. LeGuin manages to have very strong moral messages without overtly moralizing (well, usually). That's true of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as this book. The depth of her imagination helps, and her compassion for her characters. The villain in Lathe is not evil but tragic, in the classical sense that he is hubristic to a fault. And the protagonist, as in A Wizard of Earthsea, comes to his heroism and strength by way of modesty and wisdom rather than a great capacity for action or leadership.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Just one example of LeGuin's prodigious imagination and ability to recast old tropes to tell new stories: Her vision for an alien invasion of Earth, in which the initial alien attack on human bases on the Moon is a mistake, an attempt on their part to communicate before they understand that our communication with each other is verbal. They land on Earth without weapons, truly coming in peace, and we freak out, bombing everything in sight and even nuking Mount Hood to the point where it erupts. But the aliens are basically indestructible, and only once they figure out that they have to communicate with us in spoken words and then invent a way to imitate our speech are they able to settle us down. Eventually they just quietly integrate into human society, walking among us and owning small shops and other businesses. Awe-inspiring.

murphy

By Samuel Beckett. I didn't get it. I understood the plot and a few of the jokes but throughout I had the sense that there was a lot zipping right over my head. Beckett's prose is beautiful and poetic even when I don't understand the meaning. And sometimes I didn't even understand the superficial meaning, let alone what he was actually saying! The vocabulary alone is dizzying, not something I say often.

will you please be quiet, please?

Pretty brilliant, although to be honest I could have done without a couple of stories. Chandler gets predictable at times, with the way his characters behave and what he wants you to understand about them. That said, the bright spots in this book are incredible. I think my favorite stories are the first and last. The first, which I think is just called "Fat," just woke me right up. I'd just put down The Gifts of the State and the gap between his mastery and theirs was just so apparent from the first couple of pages. And the last story, for which the book is named, is beautiful and sad. A lot of the stories are, I suppose, but the title story is just the most poignant.

In fact, if I had to choose a single word to describe the book, I might go with "poignant."

I didn't enjoy it as much as Appointment in Samarra, although they're not as similar as I was expecting. O'Hara's great themes, to me, are solipsism and even narcissism and the way those can cloud our view of the world around us and our place in it; our smallness in the universe; and the damage that we can do if we don't manage to step back and understand who we are and where we are. Chandler's stories are all about self-discovery, and how brutal that process can be. His characters are smaller than O'Hara's, wrestling with subtler demons. 

Still, I'm drawn to the comparison. Maybe it's just that both men wrote about middle-class semi-urban Americans in the mid-twentieth century, and that both have a bleak outlook. 

the gifts of the state: new writing from afghanistan

This is a collection of stories by Afghans under the age of 30, written in English under the guidance of a guy named Adam Klein. They are very affecting, sometimes strange, sometimes horrifying, often but not always sad. I just started Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and already it's easy to see how much greater Carver's genius is than that of these writers. But that's not a fair comparison and it misses the point: The Gifts of the State is awesome because it humanizes and provides the kind of deep context for Afghanistan that's probably only achievable through fiction.

a wizard of earthsea

Read in like two days. Such a wonderful story. Will read Tombs of Atuan at least later this year, I don't think I've ever read it.