The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Before I go and lookup the online decoder rings to apply to this story, I wanted to say that I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to this super-short book. It’s custom-tailored to be the kind of story that I’d fall in love with: it has well-drawn characters, a good central drama, and it is both funny and heartbreaking. I think this is entirely accessible to the casual reader, for those who care to read a story about a man who wakes up to find he’s turned into a bug.

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ok, before I gush — this book isn’t perfect. There’s a lot more telling than showing, and the story is essentially three long monologues. But that’s okay with me. I think it works. The story is both heartbreaking and scary, and the epistolary nature of the book underscores the loneliness of each of the three men telling the story (that is, they have to divulge their lives to each other because they have (and have had) no one else to listen). None of the filmed versions has ever captured the full power and melancholy of Shelley’s classic. You may know the story thanks to the derivatives, but the atmosphere and tragedy is most sharply drawn in the novel. I love this one!

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There Is No Year by Blake Butler
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book. It causes enough existential dread in me for me to like it, but overall it seems like a bit of a stunt, and the imagery is a bit uneven, often cliche. Butler never met a set of parallel mirrors he didn’t like (the girl at the fast food place is wearing a shirt with a picture of the man in the car at the fast food place getting food from a girl wearing a picture of a man in the car and yadda yadda yadda … what are we? in third grade?), and neither he nor his editor apparently know the correct time to use further vs. farther (there are multiple instances of further used in reference to a concept of physical distance). At the best of times, the novel feels like a museum installation designed to show the infinite expanses of oblivion tucked within a common household (holes within holes within holes; emptiness within emptiness; these are central themes to the work), with the house itself shifting and changing as much as any body, feeling at times like a world designed by M. C. Escher, at other times like a world designed by Salvador Dali. But then again, it’s all soooo repetitious, and I’m not sure I got anything out of the second two hundred pages than I got out of the first two hundred. A few passages and sentences in particular are quite good, but there are also a lot of passages that feel pointless. I’d be interested in reading something by this writer that was a bit more thought-through and emotionally honest than this one feels.

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