No rant, I’m just tired. I don’t feel excited about anything.

I’ve been reading the free books out of the office and it’s been depressing. Some writers I used to like are doing things I just can’t get behind. Writing really long novels about New York. Circlejerking each other in ‘critical essay collections.’ Turning weirdly centrist. I guess all your heroes eventually disappoint you but these weren’t even my heroes, more just people I could rely on to write something I was interested in.

I’ve always been pessimistic about poetry and writing in general. Maybe I’m a cynic. I’m sensitive about poetry being both the thing I love and also incredibly annoying. I’m always willing to sell poetry out in the name of really good fiction.

The past few weeks I’ve been up to my neck in bad fiction, which I thought I would find less dismal than reading poetry I didn’t like but turned out to be worse. The straw that broke the camel’s back was called Peach by Emma Glass. I should say that I more skimmed than read it and then read the Goodreads reviews, but check out this opening sentence:

Thick stick sticky sticking wet ragged wool winding round the wounds, stitching the sliced skin together as I walk, scraping my mittened hand against the wall.

Jessica Sullivan called the book ‘more like a 96-page poem than a novel,’ which rankled a bit but also made me laugh. Fiction that’s horrible to read? Just call it poetry!

The spectacle of excess that is PUBLISHING churns out this stuff.

I was reading A Separation by Katie Kitamura the other day, which I liked OK, when I discovered, in the middle of a $25 hardcover, a big fat typo (“breath” where it should say “breathe”). The book is out from Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin. This is the big dogs! And still no one could be bothered to read the entire thing through… just one last time before they sent it.

Of course, that person would probably be an underpaid, overworked assistant…

OK maybe a little bit of a rant.

The last book I read was called Fire Sermon. I have a soft spot for literary fiction that’s basically erotica but this book had me gritting my teeth. It’s a first-person narrative of an affair between a married professor and a poet told largely through email and ugh, they just have so much money. At the end, the professor and her husband who rapes her, whom she hates and lies to, grow old together in a nice house in the countryside.

I could just not read this stuff and then not get angry about it, but this is what the ‘reading public’ is exposed to. This is what they buy. I just want to read something I connect to, that entertains me without pandering… I know it’s out there, but sometimes I struggle for months to find it, even as the books on my desk keep piling up.