Mr. Squishy posted:

1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. This covers the first decade of his literary life, starting off with an essay on Proust and ending with Murphy. In between he flees from Ireland before feeling compelled, where he stays for as long as he can before escaping again. Mostly Paris and London, though he does spend some time in Nazi Germany, which I didn't know. He even toyed with going to Capetown, where he really would have been out of place! Like all book of letters there are a lot of mean ones to publishers, some crawling ones to the deans of reading rooms, and a lot of just social letters, none of which are ever particularly interesting, but the most every letter has some digression, normally on art rather than literature, which I figure he decided to keep for his work. Also, he was a terrible speller!
2 The Etruscans: History of Civilisation by Michael Grant. I mostly felt guilty for really liking the idea of the Etruscans without knowing anything, at all! about them. So when I saw this handsome book in a second hand book shop for cheap, I figured why not. So I'm not sure if this near-40 year old book is the cutting edge anymore, but I can honestly say I know something about them. Like how they probably died out because their city-states did not cohere to face off any mutual militarisitc threats, or that they got their start due to ready supply of metal, or that they probably didn't worship the dead and despise the living, despite what Pope said. Now I'm not saying this is particularly in depth stuff, but I am not a classiscist.
3 The Petty Bourgeois by Maxim Gorky as translated by Margeret Wettlin. At the same shop I came across a stout volume of all of Gorky's plays that had been published in the USSR and I couldn't resist it. I must say I don't know a lot about Gorky's comparative translations but this seemed a fine enough one. As for the play itself, I can see why they named a square after him. Political Chekov.
4 Essays on Conrad by Ian Watts. Here I started dogsitting in a university town so I borrowed my host's library card and just started reading criticism on the two authors I read all the time. I wanted to read stuff on de Assis and Bernhard but it was in Portugese and German, respectively. Anyway, this selection of essays is more a covert biography than literary criticism. But it was a good deal shorter than The Three Lives so who's complaining. Watts was also one of the PoWs who built the actual bridge over the river Kwai, so he tacks on an essay about The Bridge Over the River Kwai as Myth at the end. It didn't have anything to do with Conrad, but it was enjoyable. Basically lands the Vietnam war in the laps of Pierre Boulle and David Lean, which seems a bit harsh, but I guess it was his war.
5 Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System edited by Joseph Tabbi. I was quite excited to get to this as Tabbi's been plugging this in basically everything he can. Including Joseph McElroy showing off, an essay on the musicality of JR which is nice for someone like me who's less up on his Wagner than he should be. A very successful biography of the man himself as told through his archives. It was funny how Franzen reappears as a bête noire through so many different authors, but I suppose it's to be expected.
6 Joseph Conrad's Under Western eyes : beginnings, revisions, final forms : five essays edited by David R. Smith. I honestly didn't bring my reference with me so just happened to happen across this one. More historical information about the text itself, which is sort of famous among manuscripts because of a reference in a letter by his wife where it sits at the fevered author's feet as he guards it and won't let anyone touch it. Though there's also some more interesting stuff trying to put Conrad's attitude to Russia as a Pole when he had grown up as a Russian. Weirdest of all was something constructing an elaborate freudian interpretation based on a repeated doodle in the margins, a K occasionally converted into an R. I mean, there's something there but to get so heated over it? I'm not sure.
6 The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays edited by Allen H. Simmons and J.H. Stape. I was surprised when I was reading this to bump into again an essay whose opening have frequently quoted it's opening line: "Adam Gills could only find 2 jews in the work of Conrad, I have found at least 9" - mostly among the Anarchists which Cedric Watts is quite confident in identifying. Pedantic and pugnacious, he picks his way through an intertextual relationship between TSA and the works of Lombroso. He also, entertainingly, positively identifies the year of the novel as 1877 (certainly not 1894 as the layman might assume and not as the introduction of the book may have it 1879). There was also something studying the accuracy of Conrad's london entirely based on noise, a very good essay teasing out possible references to Tosca. Most baffling was something by Ludmilla Voitkovskaand Zofia Vorontsova applying some guy Turner's theory of liminality onto TSA. This mostly was achieved by taking a synposis of the text and saying how liminal it was, much like in the work of some guy Turner. Obviously went over my head.
7 A Frolic of his Own by WIlliam Gaddis. This one's really a hoot. There's a bit where someone works out suing god. This reading has pushed Frolic up to being "most fun."
8 The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Works of William Gaddis by Gregory Comnes. A slender volume that has a very bad opening in that he waffles on about quantum physics. Now I may have the advantage on him here as he was writing in '94 before decades of waffling on about quantum physics. Guy might have transferred from a physics degree or something, but now it just sounds like a Fringe marathon was on as he was trying to fill space.I definitely have the advantage on him as this was written before Frolic was out, and without having been able to ransack Gaddis' letters where he embarrasedly admits to not having read any Benjamin until way after JR when it was suggested to him. So when Comnes seizes on any coincidences linking the two authors works as being, if not proof positive, then certainly reasons to believe in some sort of discipleage. Anyway, not the best thing on him I've read.
9 The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots by Cedric Watts. I enjoyed his essay on TSA so much I dug out this book of his, which is about that fun thing some authors do where they hide what's actually happening in the plot from anyone who glides along admiring the surface effects. In the same entertainingly strident tones he asserts that the misfortunes of Alameyer are all the work of an Arab trader whose machinations have to be totally inferred, though the inference does seem reasonable as Watts explains it. Similarly, Kurtz is deliberately stranded by a sinister quarter master whose incompetence is actually a screen for professional jealousy. He casts two separate stories as ghost stories slyer than Turn of the Screw as you don't even notice it happening, and throws in some religious analogies within the text as a "covert plot" for good measure. After all this it's a brief round the houses of all fiction which has employed similar tricks. Didja know the protagonist of Death in Venice is hounded by the god Dionysus in the form of 7 separate men and the fever itself? Well, food for thought.
10 Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby. Colossal biography which knows very well what the story is at any time. This leads to a weird effect where future meaning is definitely stamped on past accidents. Miller's early years are marked by the CIA and HUAC, with the general rule of thumb that any insignificant thing is filed away by Hoover's lot and anything actually compromising is not followed up in the hearing yet to happen. He also chops up After the Fall and scatters it throughout the book. Whenever he needs an example of Miller's difficult relationship with wives, he dips in there, meaning, which is really disorienting. He seems to have been writing that play ever since he was born. Another thing that came across was how short a period it was that Miller did some really significant work. Now I'm speaking out of ignorance, as I've not seen or read any of the less-famous ones, but the biography concludes shortly after The Misfits, 45 years before his death. Once he was happily married I suppose, or once he outlasted McCarthy. It's a good book though, he knows enough to put in the legend first though not without correcting it where the record doesn't support it. He also feels free to digress, going on lengthy walks around politics and the state of the art at the time. He even fends off pro-HUAC revisionists, though this of course leads to some more chronological confusion.
11 Agapé Agape by William Gaddis. Did you know this was at one time intended to refer to King Lear, with the author writing and tearing up wills, cutting out the devoted daughter who was, presumably, sleeping outside the door of his room like a dog. He discarded that for being "too literal" but you can see traces in the first lines about "sorting out this property", which was pretty quickly abandoned. But did you also know some perfidious editor took advantage of the author being dead to excise three sentences about how fellow-editor Robert Gottleib and the shameful way he treated John Kennedy O'Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. I don't know if these sentences have been re-instated in a more recent publication but they're not in my '05 edition, I checked.
12 The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier as translated by Harriet De Onis. This was something I picked up ages back where a lot of modernist authors were flooding te cheap second hand book shop. Alejo's a cuban musicologist and boy does it show. Not since Antony Burgess have I read so musically-literate a text. It's like The Steppen Wolf for opera lovers. The Cuban element comes from how this guy has to retreat into the wilderness to listen to a river. Anyway, some good stuff.
13 The Three Perils of Women by James Hogg. Very shaggy story without as clear an idea as Justified Sinner. But Hogg is always entertaining.
14 Single and Single by John le Carré. Badly lacked unity of plot or originality.
15 Don Carmusso by Machado de Assis as translated by x. Re-read this one again so soon because I soon lent it away.
16 The letters of Samual beckett 1941-56 edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. AKA the years he wrote the things you've read. Amazing to see how phenomenally successful Godot was. Though a lot of the letters of successful writers are all the same, bullying translators, thanking agents and the occasional stinger asking where the money is. SHould be noted how incredibly profecient the editing is, footnoting every reference they could possibly find.
17 A Dog's Heart by Mikheal Bulgakov as translated by Andrew Bromfield. You could see how a guy like him could lose friends with those in authority. Great translation too.
18 Adam Bede by George Eliot. Well, it's a strangley split narrative, like Eliot was surprised by where the story took her.
19 Opium by . A truly mental airport novel, sort of a blend of drug confessionals, espionage thrillers, and, most jarringly, private detective stuff. He even calls himself a gumshoe at one point. Also, liberal mention of Iranian literature, or at least numerous mentions of One Thousand and One Nights.
20 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. When reading Vonnegut it's always fun to think about how famously grumpy he was. Anyway, it's a Vonnegut book, you know how they are. Unless you don't, then read Slaughterhouse V instead of Jailbird.
21 Letters by John Barth. I dunno, maybe I don't find the very concept of fiction as wondrous as I should.
22 Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. I was fed up by being taunted by these unread Vonneguts on my shelf.