Book report for May 2024

Letter No. 85: Includes a shocking development, early Steinbeck, and Pluto.

The most startling thing about Dr Essai’s reading life this past month is that he bought no volumes, no additions to his library. Highly unusual, though it should be noted that this caused no discomfort on the part of Mrs Essai, who fears an old age in a house become a book cave.

Completed

• The Making of Incarnation, Tom McCarthy. I’m fascinated by McCarthy’s work, which is hard to characterize, but this novel turns tedious with its endless technical (and unexplained) jargon and overlong tangents.

• Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. I wrote about the New Horizons exploratory mission twice and at length; I saw the spacecraft before it was launched and was at the mission headquarter’s site during its Pluto flyby. So I enjoyed this recounting of the 26-year saga of the endeavor, despite the quality of the prose. Grinspoon (he was the author, working with Stern, the mission PI) is a mediocre writer who favors clichés and exclamation points. The scope of the mission team’s accomplishment carries the book.

• The Coldest Warrior, Paul Vidich. Terrific spy thriller based on the actual murder of a CIA contract scientist who in life was married to Vidich’s aunt. Vidich writes the occasional clumsy graph but rarely steps wrong. Not as good as le Carré, but who is?
• The Pastures of Heaven, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s second book, a collection of linked short stories published in 1932. Forced in places, sometimes predictable and commercial, but suggestive of what was to come as he grew into his talent.
• Best American Essays 2001, Kathleen Norris (ed.). Best of book was Rebecca McClanahan’s “Book Marks,” Carlo Rotella’s “Cut Time,” William T. Vollman’s “Upside Down and Backward” and, to my surprise, Stephen King’s “On Impact.”

In progress

• The Work of Art, Adam Moss