Notes to Chess

*Despite the fact that Dunnett lets the move-by-move narration go after four or five moves--which, as I had been sketching out the moves as they happened, super-nerd-style, disappointed me immensely--I have not a whit of doubt that she had, in her files somewhere, the log of the entire game. Meticulous doesn't even begin to describe Dunnett's approach to detail. God, I wish there were any other writer quite like her.

Notes to I know where to hide those ludes!, or, Place-based boredom

*The outer limits of conceivable eternity at that point being, say, the sixteen years (and scraggly mustache) to which your REO Speedwagon–t-shirted neighbor had attained.

Notes to The English Ghost

* I can use these words that way without mixing metaphors, right? "Magpie" plays the role of an adjective, modifying "archive mouse"? Work with me here, people.

Notes to Through gates of horn and ivory, or, Entering the realm of the Oneiroi

*

Notes to Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

8 And that's only the first of a dismayingly large number of playlets, a mistake forgivable in a first novelist who feels omnipotent, far less so in a novelist submitting himself to the public a second time. I know This Side of Paradise was a success, but wasn't there any carping? Any criticism that might have buffeted Fitzgerald just enough to make him draw in his wings a tad?

Notes to Harry Mathews and the productive pleasure of constraints

* When I was six, I wrote two songs: "Horses are Fun" and "Horseshoes on the Sidewalk." The latter was a sad song, in a minor key.

Notes to Surprises, pleasant

* This category overlaps significantly with the category of books I find myself reading aloud from to rocketlass. The Book of Freaks had a strong showing in that category, but it's going to be tough for anything this year to top Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia. No matter what he's writing about, Frazier's work begs to be read aloud, and his Siberia book--because it's about Russia, and Russia is crazy--has something worth sharing on nearly every one of its 500-plus pages.

rocketlass is remarkably tolerant.