the last book I ever read (The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese, except three)

from The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese:

As the Voyeur’s correspondence and voiced comments kept harking on the familiar theme of his alienation and agony, it occurred to me that he might be approaching something close to a mental breakdown; and I sometimes imagined him in terms of the psychotic anchorman in the 1976 film Network, who implodes: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” I was reminded as well of certain literary works from long ago: John Cheever’s 1947 story in the New Yorker “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s marriage slowly suffers as their newly purchased radio mysteriously allows them to overhear and become affected by the conversations and secrets of their neighboring tenants; and Nathanael West’s 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, in which an advice-dispensing newspaper columnist becomes an unstable, irascible alcoholic due to his frustrations and sensitivities vis-à-vis his readers’ empty lives and dubious solutions

Except, in the Voyeur’s case, I believed his criticisms of other people were expressed without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Here was a snooper in the attic claiming the moral high ground while scrutinizing and judging his guests harshly, and, at the same time, appropriating for himself the right to pry with detachment and immunity.

the last book I ever read (The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese, except two)

from The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese:

When I read this account in New York a few years after I’d visited him in Aurora—and nearly six years after the murder—I was shocked and surprised. I thought that the Voyeur’s detached and irresponsible response to the fracas in Room 10 was similar to the behavior of New York crime witnesses when a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese was being attacked by a man with a knife on a street in Queens shortly after 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964.

Although some facts in this case were later disputed—among them that the initial estimate of thirty-eight murder witnesses was an exaggerated number—there was no dispute that several people in Queens saw at least part of the brutality from their apartment windows, and that none of them rushed down into the street in time to rescue or assist the young woman who would soon bleed to death. The New York Times, which broke the story, quoted one unidentified neighbor as saying that he told another neighbor to telephone the police because “I didn’t want to get involved.”

the last book I ever read (The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese, except one)

from The Voyeur's Motel by Gay Talese:

As a footnote to this incident, the Voyeur asked in his journal, “Will anybody believe that this actually happened?”

If I had not seen the observation platform with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe Foos’s entire account. Indeed, over the decades since we met, in 1980, I had noticed various inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his Voyeur’s Journal are dated 1966, but the deed of sale for the Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office, shows that he purchased the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don’t quite scan. I have no doubt that Foos was an epic voyeur, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except ten)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

No one but our group of wine-tasting Americans seemed to be staying at the farm, and so there were two tables at dinner, which was always outdoors, under the stars, and one table was the famiglia and the other table was the Americans. The dinners were at least three hours long every night and came with endless amounts of wine. There was always an antipasto, a pasta course, a second pasta course, a meat course, a salad course, and dessert. I was usually ready to go to bed after the antipasto. The wine tasters—mostly fine upstanding citizens of suburbs of the United States with a generous capacity for European pretenses, people who went to the ballet, or wore berets, or had children who were experts on Jane Austen—were ready to drink some wine, and even though Italian wine is not known to be as culturally exacting as French wine, it was all part of this experience for them, the wine, the food, the fragrance of the Adriatic, the fresh olives of a sort you have never tasted in your life. They would all hit the wine hard, and it did not take long into the two weeks we all spent together for certain marriages that had seemed rock-solid at the outset, like that of Brenda and Dave McAllister, a couple from Indianapolis who had been to Italy together three times, to unravel. It became clear that Dave’s inability to let his wife finish a sentence had taken a real toll on her, and Brenda rolled her eyes at him the more drunk he got, and once, barely out of earshot, she made a joke about asphyxiating him.

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except nine)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

Things can go wrong during your vacation. For example, you could suffer a detached retina, which is a very serious condition and requires surgery. It is also possible that during your vacation, upon boarding the cruise liner or while changing planes in Geneva, you could begin to exhibit the symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, resulting in a sudden drop in blood pressure. (I believe there are hemoglobin issues as well, due to the acute decrease in blood volume secondary to a massive upper-GI bleed, or that is my understanding, though I am not a medical professional.) And sometimes people have little stroke; you know, not terribly complex strokes, but just little strokes where they have temporary aphasia and can’t repeat numbers in the correct order. You could experience one of these very disturbing phenomena on your vacation. This could be your fate. (Or, as I have related elsewhere, your passport could be lifted from your pocket by Carpathian-speaking youths.) It is impossible to plan for all these difficulties. Why not stay home? But if instead of staying home, you insist on going on vacation, then this entry, about agroturismo in Italia, is for you.

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except eight)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

I have stayed in Omaha, and I have stayed in St. Louis, and I have stayed in Manchester, and I have stayed in Springfield (it almost doesn’t matter which Springfield), and I have stayed in Sarasota, and I have stayed in Albany, and I have stayed in Providence, and I have stayed in New Brunswick, and I have stayed in Trenton, and I have stayed in Columbus, and I have stayed in Milwaukee, and I have stayed in Davenport, and I have stayed in Worcester, which may be the saddest American city I have ever stayed in, and I have stayed in Stamford, and I have stayed in New Haven, and I have stayed in Albuquerque, and I have stayed in Fort Worth, and I have stayed in Moscow (the one in Idaho), and I have stayed in Tacoma, and I have stayed in Denver, and I have stayed in Edina, and I have stayed in Rutland, and I have stayed in Lewiston, and I have stayed in Elko, Nevada. In each of these municipalities, you could feel these American cities grabbing you by the lapel and trying to remind you that they were not nearly as bad as they manifestly appeared out the window of either the hotel or the rented vehicle. And yet in no case was any American city as woebegone and desperate to change its story as Cleveland.

the last book I ever read (Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, except seven)

from Hotels of North America by Rick Moody:

Irena and I whispered, gasped, and stifled cackles about how laughable the uncle had been until we got back to our tent, made cheese sandwiches by Coleman lantern, and then, in each other’s arms, tried to sleep. In the forest, you know, though it is the placidest location of anyplace, it’s hard not to think about murder. In the silence there is murder; in the occasionally snapped twig caused by some fawn happening by there is murder, and it’s worse when you have just beaten the alcoholic proprietor, not just once but four times, at Ping-Pong, and all you can think about is that he knows which campsite you’re squatting on, and if he wants to come by with his chain saw, he can. He’ll simply tell the local paper that you never showed up at all.