kerryvaughan's reviews
169 reviews

First clunker of 2025. What a bummer. 

Carrere got onto my radar for The Mustache (which I’m still open to reading) so I snagged a used copy of this little book about a little boy having a tremendously terrible time on a ski trip with his classmates. Anxiety and dread build like a ski slope in a steady falling snow. 

I like the setup. There are a few cool sentences. And as a movie I think this could slap. But I guessed the plot almost immediately, and the story seems somehow simultaneously rushed and too long. And the “Stephen King is salami but this is caviar” comparison on the back cover does the book NO favors. The writing ain’t all that special. 

I am not going to keep this book but I’m not ready to kick Carrere to the curb just yet. Anyone read anything else by him? Is this just a mid effort from a good author? #2025books

My first but not last Cocteau. I quite liked this little book and its “delicious” phrasing, though I think I have Lehmann to thank for that as much as Cocteau. 

This copy appears to be the second printing of the @ndpublishing edition, and I love how worn and broken in it is. Easy to daydream about all the hands this has passed through, how many people considered it “treasure” for their “Rooms.” Used books > new books til the day I croak. 

Link to last book: short story called “The Holy Terror” in All The Days and Nights 
Link to last few books: complicated sibling relationships 
#2025books

How did I live without William Maxwell’s writing in my life. It’s fantastic, not a letter out of place. 

Actually I’ll tell you how. When I was younger, I would have been too cynical and too angry to have liked Maxwell’s style. These stories spanning 50 years of writing are wise and funny, sad and wistful, brutal and tender blows to the heart. He writes tragically gorgeous paragraphs about grief, age and death in a way a younger, less experienced, less wrinkly me just would not have appreciated. 

But if you have lost loved ones or ever been in love or are finding yourself softening in these recent years, as I physically and emotionally am, then you will find something to hold here. And you will likely be held as well. #2025books

Happy Valentine’s Day, freaks and tweaks. 

8. Love by Peter Nadas. When I learned my order of this book was gonna arrive on Valentine’s Day, I resolved to read it same-day. And now I have. 

A man is at a girl’s place to dump her but first they smoke joints and get really, really high. And he descends (soars?) into a head space of recursive contemplation of place, time, reality, and yes, a little bit of love, and of madness. “But after some time, the insane go nuts.” 

I immediately had a soft spot for this short book because if you’ve ever been really, really, really out of your gourd on booze or drugs (which I have of course never), then this will  make you (not me of course) say “same, bro, same” (which I of course did not say). 

And along the way, it IS sweet and he DOES love her. At least in the moment. Which he can’t seem to get out of. 

I also got this bc it only had 4 reviews on Amazon and 3 of them were 1-star hate bombs, which cracked me up. Next slide please. #2025books

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell 

Loved it. Been a long time since a book made me cry but damn, man, set that Days Since Last Accident calendar back to 0. 

In just 133 pages, Maxwell’s narrator recounts memories of a fledgling childhood friendship with a boy whose father kills a man. Alongside his own memories, he imagines what this boy and the involved parties may have said and done. He speculates and guesses, and reflects on the fallibility of moments in time. “In any case, when talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” 

His characters are flawed and beautiful and cruel, as we all are. And throughout, Maxwell’s prose cracked me up, broke my heart and dropped my jaw. Funny, gut-wrenching mastery of words and rhythm. Each paragraph a morsel.

I’m an instant devotee and am already reading All The Days and Nights. #2025books

“I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.”

^^ Heard. ^^ 

Cormac’s a vibe, no doubt about it. If you want to see fictional suffering flayed and splayed in stark vivid prose, read this. No surprise that McCarthy is relentlessly bleak but some surprise, at least for me, at just how far into the “outer dark” he goes here. And how funny he can be. Maybe that’s just me. I find comedy in the deepest blackest holes. 

John, thanks for the recommendation; this ink in the water (blood in the breast milk, as Cormac would have it) hit the spot.

PS: I separated art from artist here and pretended I read this before learning Cormac was apparently a rank dog. 

5. Journal Of A Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck. If you love Eden or Steinbeck, you must read this. 

Fate put this book in a Jackson, TN Goodwill last weekend for me to find while I was reading East of Eden. Could not have been better timing and could not have been a better epilogue to a book I was not ready to be done with. I am very lucky to have found it. 

Steinbeck wrote Eden in a giant notebook given to him by his friend and editor Pascal Covici. Each day, he’d write a letter to Pat on the left pages and write Eden on the right. The result is this collection of real-time insights into writing Eden and into the Hamiltons, minutia of Steinbeck’s life (“today I did many things, redesigned a toilet and rebuilt it, fixed my fish bowl”), bonus: the story of Steinbeck carving the actual box presented to Pat at the beginning of Eden, and darkly intimate (sometimes hilarious) insecurity, doubt and self-deprecation. Oddly comforting to know the mountainous Steinbeck was after all as human as the rest of us pebbles. #2025books

4. East of Eden by John Steinbeck 

“Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.”

When the book is this good? Me too, Tom, me too. 12/10. No notes. Steinbeck never misses.

I was already a bit of a Steinbeck stan/betch (call me ol’ John Stanbetch up in here) and finally got to this masterpiece (thanks Josh) and realize that between this and Runaway Soul (also thanks Josh), #2025books is starting out to be a take-no-prisoners reading year. What a thrill. 

“Now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.”

“And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because ‘Thou mayest.’”

“Don’t be sad,” said Cal. “I’m going to let you use my rifle.” 
Aron’s head jerked around. “You haven’t got a rifle.” 
“Haven’t I?” Cal said. “Haven’t I though?”

3. The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey. 

This is the longest, thickest and meatiest book I’ve had in years. I think Brodkey would want to know that.

It’s the story-non-story-anti-story of Wiley Silenowicz’s early life, various parts of it, filtered through Wiley, various parts of him. Well, mostly just two parts. The brain and the other brain. 

Physical, mental, sensual and intellectual experiences smashed through the strainer of memory, ground through the mill of writing it down, then relived and digested again. It’s Wiley’s ouroboros of self. It is visceral and horny and sad and very, very male. It’s a 100 page sex scene that is barely about sex. It’s an introspection on family, connections and cruelty. It’s a confession and a boast. 

If I’d read my own review before I read this book, I wouldn’t have read this book. But I’m glad I did, because through it all, it is *good.* Brodkey’s got some absolutely laughable dialogue, and I nearly threw chairs when four-year-old genius Wiley *taught himself to read*…*in half an hour*, but there is also some absolutely stunning prose here, and the end result is a family that will never leave my brain. 4/5 but I may rate higher after I’ve come down from it. #2025books