Delightful (and sometimes moving) unpunctuated poems by a city cockroach with the soul of a vers libre poet, with illustrations by George Herriman.

Could have been helpful during that first, abortive semester studying electrical engineering.

The title story inspired the quite different but worthy Antonioni movie, but much more interesting to me are “Axolotl,” “House Taken Over,” and “A Continuity of Parks.”

Ebullient, strange, expressionistic. A wonderful book that I hope to revisit often.

A hilarious and perceptive exploration of that age-old question: Am I a robot?

One of these days I’d like to dive into an unabridged version of the 1001 Nights, but there’s never enough time for all the books I want to read.

I don’t know if it was actually this book, but one of my most beloved checkouts from the Corpus Christi public library as a teen was a massive (and beautiful) hardbound Little Nemo collection.

The first half of the book was easy going and revealed Barth, whom I’d never read before, to be a surprisingly good storyteller. I have to admit that I found the second half to be quite abstruse and difficult. The book reminded me in some ways of “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,” and in other ways of the themes of depthlessness, exhaustion, and anxiety that seem to come up often in discussions of postmodern fiction.

An unholy combination of Scooby Doo and Leopold & Loeb. I couldn’t bring myself to finish this because of the embarrassingly bad writing. Bloated with hundreds of unnecessary pages.

Here are transcribed several lectures that Borges gave at Harvard University in 1967. He ruminates on metaphors, translation, the novel, the epic, etc. with wit and erudition. I can’t say that I always agree with him - he privileges the epic form over the modern novel (to oversimplify, modernism is degenerate while the epic is heroic) - but it’s still a gift to be privy to the insights of a man who loved literature as Borges did. It should be noted that Borges had almost completely lost his vision at this point—the lectures were read without notes, which simply astounds me given Borges’s gift for quotation. Any lover of Borges will treasure this book.