Reading Well: Bob the Gambler by Frederick Barthelme and Double Down by Frederick Barthelme & Steven Barthelme

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Donald Barthelme is easily the most famous of the clan, but his brothers, Frederick and Steven, were also writers, English professors by profession and somewhat degenerate gamblers by choice. I read Bob the Gambler by Frederick (1997) first, and enjoyed it so much that I immediately located a copy of Double Down (1999), which I’ll discuss first.

Double Down is the joint memoir by both brothers, focusing on the years after the death of their parents (roughly a decade after Donald’s death to cancer). Their father, a somewhat renowned architect and early adopter of post-brutalist modernism, seems a profoundly difficult man, demanding and idiosyncratic, and there are unresolved gestures towards emotional abuse. Their mother, in contrast, is portrayed as the source of emotional solace, safety, and comfort in the family.

Ultimately for me, while often moving, the portrayal of the parents is lacking: the mix of the utterly binary nature of their roles in the boys’ psyches and the lack of compelling detail on where the great pain around their father’s behavior comes from leaves the picture far too incomplete for a book that is so … Freudian … in its structure (by that, I mean that the narrative itself presents the parental dynamics as the key to understanding who they are, then refuses to fully disclose those same dynamics; so, yeah, Freudian).

The brothers are both childless, teaching at the same university, and somewhat unsure of what’s next for them. Enter the newly-opened casinos along the Gulf Coast.

They go on a whim, instantly see the appeal of the flashing lights and potential riches. Their grief over their parents fuels their behavior, aided not insignificantly by their inheritance, which increases their tolerance for loss from a hundreds of dollars to thousands and, ultimately, tens of thousands.

This makes them favorites of the casino, with the enhanced treatment that carries with it, the sense of camaraderie with staff, the free rooms and easy access to markers to fuel more gambling. They are both aware of what is happening, and convinced that this strategy, this ritual, this bankroll management notion, will be the key to turning it all around.

And then, quite suddenly, the entire narrative is interrupted by a very strange set of occurrences, where the brothers are charged with felony crimes by the casino, which believes them to be part of a ring trying to “cheat the house.” The accusation seems ludicrous, given how much they consistently lose (and the charges are eventually dismissed), but the repercussions are serious–legal challenges, holding cells, the uncertainty of the future. Serious enough they stop gambling for a while, and serious enough that the memoir narrative is essentially derailed.

It all makes for a somewhat interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling read for me.

Which is in strong contrast to Bob the Gambler, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The narrative of this easy-to-read novella follows much of the memoir: the protagonist lives on the Gulf Coast, tries the casinos on a lark, quickly becomes a committed gambler.

But the story is anchored in a family that is portrayed with such skill and sweetness, especially the core trio of the protagonist, his partner, and his step-daughter, that there is a balance to the unmitigated loss of control that comes along with the gambling.

Yes, they lose everything. But they do it together and, if you will, intentionally. Yes, it puts their careers in jeopardy. But they make reasonable choices in light of that. And through it all, the family cares for each other, clearly prioritizing that above all (well, most) else.

It’s such a departure from the usual gambling fare, which either leaves the character in abject misery or phenomenal wealth. If there is a quibble, it’s tied to the ambiguity of the ending. But endings are hard, and I understand the choices made.

So … a strong recommendation for Bob the Gambler, if that kind of narrative subject appeals. And a much more tepid recommendation for Double Down, essentially only if you’re somewhat of a completist on gambling memoirs or have a particular obsession with the Barthelmes.

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Reading Well: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Fraud, Zadie Smith‘s 2023 novel, is a bit of a departure for her: it is a historical novel, focusing on real people and real events in the late 19th century, specifically the household of the once-acclaimed writer William Harrison Ainsworth and the phenomenon of the Tichborne trial.

The Fraud is also a reflection on aging, tracing the characters over many decades of their lives and an exploration of the 19th century relations between England and its Caribbean colonies, specifically Jamaica.

It succeeds on all fronts.

That it does is a tribute to Smith’s consummate skill as a novelist, to her ability to draw characters and events in sharp lines while not sacrificing the nuance and inflection that makes people real, complicated, and compelling. It is a novel of doubt and uncertainty, and one that resists making pronouncements on any of its characters: even Ainsworth’s vanity and self-obsession are somewhat evened out in the eyes of the protagonist. As such, the use of the Tichborne trial–where an (alleged) imposter returns to claim a fortune–is masterful, both in the enigmatic Jamaican character it introduces and how it amplifies the core question of identity within the novel. In the end–as in reality–the questions of who am I and who are we remain unanswerable, especially if divorced from any particular moment in time.

There is also a delightful and occasionally effectively comedic set of cameos by Charles Dickens, whose success and particular eccentricities loom over Ainsworth’s continued struggles.

I mean … it’s Zadie Smith. If the description piques your interest at all, go read it.

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Reading Well: The Bloodsworn Trilogy by John Gwynne

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

John Gwynne‘s Bloodsworn Trilogy contains The Shadow of the Gods (2021), The Hunger of the Gods (2022), and The Fury of the Gods (2024).

My guess is most of you who will absolutely adore this trilogy already know about it, and have been waiting anxiously for Gwynne to publish the somewhat-delayed final volume. The delay is a product of a tragedy: the death of a young child, and honestly I’m quite impressed that Gwynne finished the story, given that.

These are long, blood-soaked sagas of novels, heavily inspired by, if not the Vikings themselves, certainly the modern-day reinvention of the Vikings. While perhaps a bit repetitive by the end of the 3rd book–there are only but so many ways to describe a hand ax being buried in a foe’s cranium–overall, they deliver.

The series follows perhaps a dozen characters, all pulled into a massive conflict between long-dead Gods come to life. There are protagonists on all sides of the conflict, but one certainly both stands out and is highlighted, and her journey, as a warrior, as a mother, as a friend, make the text quite compelling.

Gwynne also does something magical, something that in my experience is virtually unique in the genre. He just … ignores … biological differences when it comes to physical capacities. It’s actually brilliant and remarkable: he doesn’t have women being overpowered by men, nor does he have a quicker, more subtle, fighting style that suits women better. Instead, if he wants a character to be the biggest swinging ax on the battlefield, they just are, regardless of their gender. It’s liberating, in a very fun way.

There are some gestures to situating the characters in a thoroughly pre-modern state, where the notion of consciousness is just beginning to emerge … but that is both inconsistent and deeply secondary to the page-turning, heart-thumping spectacle, risk, and carnage. If that sounds good–and you don’t mind devoting well over 1,500 pages in total to a single massive narrative arc–you’ll enjoy these books.

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Reading Well: The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

S.L. Huang retells the story of Water Margin, a tale described as a minor classic of martial arts literature in their 2023 novel, The Water Outlaws. While retaining the setting and shape of the source material, Huang gender-flips many of the characters, creating a narrative that embraces the tradition while simultaneously resisting it.

On the whole, it works, providing an engaging outlaw narrative with strong female leads and relationships. It’s a bit of a page turner, and is full of scenes that you can easily see in a wuxia style (if unfamiliar with the term–and I’m by no means an expert on it–think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). So there is violence, but it is both highly stylized and overly extreme, which serves to make it more recognizable as fiction than horrifically grotesque.

If there is an issue with The Water Outlaws–and perhaps the genre in general–it is the moral ambiguity that creeps into the work. The protagonists are guilty of many of the same actions as the villains, and the ethical rationalizations occasionally lack conviction. But, whatever: if you just root for the underdogs, and let them be as violent as the oppressors, it’s all a good ride.

Recommended, given the above.

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Reading Well: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I usually hold off on writing about series until they are complete, but it’s not clear when (if?) Moniquill Blackgoose plans to release a sequel to 2023’s To Shape A Dragon’s Breath. I hope they do, as this is an engaging, thoughtful, and creative work. It is firmly and fully a YA adventure.

Set in an alternate colonial North America, the protagonist is an indigenous member of an island community off the coast of Massachusetts that is subject to colonial rule, but, lacking any desirable natural resources, has to date been largely neglected by the increasingly oppressive powers of the mainland. Neighboring communities have not been so fortunate, and the expansionist hunger of a young nation is in full bloom.

This word alternate is important: this is a land of a different colonial mix, including a greater presence of the Nordic powers, and, of course, here there be dragons. In traditional YA structure, and much to everyone’s surprise, the protagonist is selected by a young dragon and she is then sent to the mainland to an educational institution for proper instruction in dragon care and management, and the story expands from there.

Some of it is familiar: class and culture clashes abound, a small group of outcasts band together, indignities are suffered and resisted, and help comes from a small minority of sympathetic faculty members, all against a backdrop of growing oppression and growing violence from different colonial interests.

The charm of the book is Blackgoose’s ability to pull it off, but its power is their ability to do so within a nuanced and diverse universe. Differences and disabilities are embraced, and supported in ways that feel subtle, realistic, and never overly forced into the spotlight. You may be aware that Blackgoose is saying something about Autistic communication needs, but it is so firmly grounded in the characters that it never, for me, felt preachy or false.

There is far more to Blackgoose’s narrative than the surface reveals, making it a highly recommended YA adventure tale. I do hope sequels, or at least other works by Blackgoose, emerge.

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Reading Well: Trans Girl Suicide Museum by hannah baer

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I am so far from the target audience of Trans Girl Suicide Museum that I hesitate to comment on it.

But, I did read it, and I do have thoughts … so …

Trans Girl Suicide Museum (2019) is hannah baer‘s memoir of their transition. It is obsessed with a few themes: how to exist in transition, ketamine, trans identity itself, ketamine, and, more loosely, the relationship between the self and contemporary, digital, meme-driven art.

baer is an excellent and self-aware writer, has a skillful tragicomic touch, and the narrative is quick, compelling, and, yes, highly ketamine fueled as it moves through New York City in the 2010s. There is a political dimension to baer’s writing that sits alongside a (for me) only partially examined level of class privilege, and these two threads sitting so close to each other was sometimes jarring.

But the real substance of TGSM is about identity and art, and quite specifically, identity and art in the early decades of the 21st century. It is a book that is inescapably tethered to its historical moment and, as such, its interest may already be drifting towards the archival (the sophistication of discourse around trans identity continues to grow and grow–partially because of thinkers like baer, of course–and while ketamine use continues in NYC, the rise of fentanyl has certainly added some caution, if not restraint, to those scenes).

Like I said, though: I’m not the target audience here, and baer’s basic request of CIS-presenting old folks is to just shower money on young trans people they meet–which, honestly, is not the worst advice in those situations. So my thoughts on the book seem both unasked for and unimportant.

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The Witness for the Dead & The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Set after the events of The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison‘s The Witness for the Dead (2021) and The Grief of Stones (2022), are, simply, delightful.

They most closely resemble the rambling murder mysteries associated with Sunday nights on PBS, but with elves. And goblins. And elf/goblin hybrid offspring.

The protagonist of both books is an individual with the ability to commune with the recently deceased. He is generally tasked with easing the grief of individuals in his community, a position made possible through his highly politically tenuous employ via a complicated ecclesiastical structure. But that is more background: closer to the surface are the challenges of unwinding a series of (seemingly) unrelated deaths, a budding romance against the backdrop of grand Elven opera, an undesired-yet-promising apprentice, and the dangerous assignment of quieting particularly ravenous undead spirits that arise when burial rites go awry.

All of this is punctuated by regular cups of tea, with insight into which varietals are superior, and walks across a city that is drawn with such depth and consistency that it immediately comes into full existence for the reader.

There are moments of intense adventure here, but only moments: these books are enjoyable in the way a slow walk is enjoyable. I like me some long walks, and I highly recommend these novels, to the point where I will sometime in 2025 dive into more of Addison’s output, with fairly high expectations.

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Reading Well: The Last Ranger by Peter Heller

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Painter by Peter Heller was the very first book I wrote about for Reading Well. Later, I wrote up The River, and while it preceded these scribblings, his even earlier novel Dog Star remains one of my favorite novels ever.

So, I’m a Heller fan.

2023’s The Last Ranger hit at an incredibly opportune time personally. Without knowing its content, I happened to read it just before a family trip to Yellowstone, where the novel is set. Heller’s gifts are in his descriptions of the natural world and in his explorations of alternate modes of contemporary masculinity, and both are on full display in The Last Ranger.

The protagonist is indeed a ranger (although certainly not the final one), deeply devoted to the preservation of the beauty of the Park, a constant struggle against both local political forces that resent the area and the never-ending selfish stupidity of the ever-present waves of tourists. He’s also, like many of Heller’s protagonists, middle-aged, a bit damaged, and deeply committed to a sense of ethics guided by a reverence for and understanding of the natural world.

The wolves of Yellowstone–reintroduced in the mid 1990s and currently thriving–feature heavily, and one of the joys of Heller’s writing, which is never didactic, is nevertheless leaving the novel feeling better informed about the geology, ecology, and flora and fauna of the area, including a fantastic set of descriptions of just how important apex predators are to entire ecosystems.

This is a mystery, one with violence towards both people and other mammals at its center. There are some satisfying twists and turns in the plot, and the protagonist’s struggles (both successful and not) to form meaningful relationships are written with a deep humanity, one that, in the end, dictates the final outcome in a way that prevents there being any single, simple resolution.

I like that, and I love the comfort of Heller’s writing. Very strongly recommended.

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Reading Well: The Passenger & Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

Posted on December 21, 2024 by Daniel (@MKNN)

There are, in my view, few–if any–greater American novelists of the late 20th century than Cormac McCarthy. His final two novels, released simultaneously in 2022, form a fitting capstone on his career. The Passenger and Stella Maris are related, but very different novels.

Look, it’s McCarthy. Read it. It’s not even McCarthy in his brutalist mode, so if the horrors of Blood Meridian were too much for you, it’s fine. Read these two novels.

I’ll just mention a few things.

One of McCarthy’s great gifts is a writerly voice born to authority. In earlier novels, you would learn as much about horses and tack from his characters as you could from instructional materials; here, it is diving, especially related to wreck salvage, and, somewhat marvelously incongruously, theoretical physics. I know nothing about diving, and so merely surrender to McCarthy’s voice, but I know a thimbleful or three about theoretical physics, especially in its narrative (as opposed to mathematical) forms, and his authority there is well-earned. He knows his stuff and, far more importantly, continues to be able to weave that information into the narrative in ways that are natural, unforced, and not didactic.

In so far as these categories even exist, McCarthy is a writer of the masculine, of male characters, of male observation and desire, of complex relationships between men. So while Stella Maris does have a female protagonist, it is a little problematic: she is psychotic, traumatized, and incestously obsessed with her brother, the protagonist of The Passenger. She’s a great character, richly compelling. But also … I mean … come on, Cormac …

Finally, moreso than his earlier work, both of these novels exist in the realm of ideas as much as, if not more than, the world of action. The Passenger has an action-driven plot for much of its length, but even there, there are diversions into music theory, into the aforementioned theoretical physics, into the nature of reality and its relationship with delusion. I think its overall “readability” is incredibly high, but it’s not the pulse-pounding action of, say, Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men.

Highly, highly recommended, as much in honor of McCarthy’s body of work as for their singular pleasures.

Note: this was written before the recent flurry of revelations about McCarthy’s consensual-yet-age-and-power-divergent relationships. Someday perhaps I’ll write about my specific streetcorner on the relationship between artists and their art and the implications of un/ethical behavior on our understanding of them and their work. But, today is not that day, so I leave it to you to make your own choices regarding Cormac, and others.

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Reading Well: Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia is something I remember in a very inarticulate way. It happened in 1985, and formed part of the backdrop of my reading things like Bobby Seale‘s Seize the Time and Samuel Yette‘s The Choice in High School in DC. I remember the general tone of the media coverage was … suspicious, a sense that these nutty radicals must have been doing SOMETHING to warrant this kind of violent, deadly response.

In the intervening decades that we’ve become more public in our questioning of the motives of the brutal force of urban power structures. But of course that discourse has always existed, and the treatment of MOVE is certainly foreshadowed in the work of Seales and Yette, and hundreds, if not thousands, of other individuals.

John Edgar Wideman, whose Hoop Dreams I read and enjoyed, published Philadelphia Fire in 1990, essentially rapidly after the bombing. The book is … a lot of things. It mixes reflections on MOVE; on the bombing; on the travails of aging; on (as often in Wideman’s work) basketball, especially the pickup variety; and on a somewhat aborted attempt to produce Shakespeare in the park with kids from round the way.

Wideman is haunted by the child survivors of the bombing, by what they experienced and what happened to them. They are elusive, ghostly, and ubiquitous. The connecting thread through the book is grief, the grief of the violence against his community, the grief of his own passing youth, the grief of a lost relationship.

Widcman’s style isn’t for everyone: there is a lyricism, a playfulness with language, a freedom in form that may, for some, drift into being overwrought. But I enjoy it, and the overall structure of Philadelphia Fire, which wanders freely between memoir, fiction, and a blurry combination of the two, worked for me.

To the degree the subject matter appeals, recommended highly.

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