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Jack Everett

@jacks_paperbacks

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📍 Toronto, Canada
Book Reviewer / lover of all things literature

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V. by Thomas Pynchon

After a few false starts over the last few years, I have finally finished V., and with that have read all of Pynchon’s novels and it’s a really good feeling. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon is my favourite writer, and these last five years of reading him has given me so much joy and enlightenment. His works have changed how I see the world and made me a better reader.

V. published in 1963, tells the story of two men: Herbert Stencil, who’s lost inside his past/family legacy and the other, Benny Profane, who is set adrift in post-WWII America. As the story progresses, these two men’s lives converge as they search for a mysterious woman named V. It’s a romp that traverses space and time, from NYC sewers and 50s taverns, to the ancient streets of Egypt, the desolate coasts of southern Africa, and the museums of Europe. As we yo-yo back and forth, we meet a myriad of characters and situations, both menacing and hilarious. It’s a world with bohemian artists with all their neurosis and arrogance, a world with gangland-style rumbles with switchblades and leather jackets, and a world with small cafe dealings with the spectres and agents of colonialism. There is sex, death and crocodiles.

Simply put, V. is the big bang of the Thomas Pynchon Universe. Everything starts here (maybe in tandem with the early stories in Slow Learner) and lays the groundwork for what follows. Pynchon introduces us to his zany wordplay and mic-dropping prose, his quirky character names, strange scenes, and his encyclopedic knowledge. His stance on institutions and authority is clearly stated, and it marks the birth of the very specific and terrifying Pynchon Paranoia. We are introduced to themes that will be explored and expanded throughout the rest of his work, and these ideas are constantly mirrored and split apart. And we come to realize that from the start his works are having a conversation with one another. It’s a marvel to behold and breathtaking. [conclusion in comments] by @jacks_paperbacks

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7 days ago

The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath

Back in July, when I first picked up The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, I was craving something to break up all the larger books I was juggling, something that I could pick up and put down without major consequences, something to get me away from doomscrolling at night and to read while on a family camping trip. This collection did all these things and so much more. The collection covers her work from her younger years through her major artistic period from 1956 to her death in 1963. At first I wasn’t sure if this was the best place to start with Plath’s poetry, but as soon as I started reading, it was clear I had made the right choice. This collection is extremely comprehensive, not only in the scope of the work but also in its notes, author bio, and essay on Plath.

I’m still learning how to describe my feelings when it comes to reading poetry, so for lack of something profound and perhaps lofty, I’ll simply say Plath’s poetry is powerful. She commands your attention with her verse, allusions and imagination. She has the strength and rigour to waterboard you with melancholy, so if you want lighter fare, stay away. I’ll be honest: not all of it sank in. Another caveat: I stopped at her poems published after 1960, as most of these works are in The Colossus and Ariel, which I recently acquired. From the poems I did read, it was fascinating to see which ones resonated with me, which images grabbed me, and what scenes troubled me at this particular moment in my life in the summer of 2026.

As I dove deeper and deeper into this work, I realized it was something I would return to for years to come, and that I had only scratched the surface. I look forward to revisiting this collection and more of her work to study, entertain and enlighten. by @jacks_paperbacks

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18 days ago

Three Tenses by Ed Park

“In Three Tenses, I wrote about events in the past using the present tense. The third tense—the future-had to wait until now to unfold: in a life I could scarcely imagine, in a time when the normal order was falling apart, in a place where my narrow circumstances unearthed a book that had been waiting for me to find it, and to remember.”

After trudging through the horrors of Dasa Drndic’s Trieste, I was in serious need of a palate cleanser and something a little lighter in subject matter, and there waiting for me was Ed Park’s new work Three Tenses.

In its preface, Ed explains this “autobiographical structure” he has built. Rather than writing a straight-up autobiography (“I was born blah blah blah...”), Park gives us little snippets and moments from a life. It’s a life filled with tidbits, facts, and quotes that hold equal weight, charm, and abstraction. Each one of these tiles, as he calls them, makes up a mosaic of a life.

These little transmissions don’t give us the whole picture, but they leave us with an indescribable feeling of what life is all about. A life where the mundane and useless go up against the utterly profound. It’s a really refreshing work, and I’m glad big publishers are willing to publish a book like this. I also really enjoyed peering into Ed’s mind, seeing a writer at work and finding his “voice,” to use that horribly cliché term. Three Tenses is like a literary sketchbook of ideas that are being tested and explored. It has this strange, almost “Letters to a Young Poet” vibe, where Ed Park acts as both Rilke and the young poet Kappus. A conversation happens between transmissions, and it’s really fun to engage with. If you’re looking for something a little different in your literature, check this work out. Thanks @randomhousebooks for this review copy! by @jacks_paperbacks

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a month ago

Trieste by Dasa Drndic

“What is hidden in my genes? and I will tell them and I’ll say it over and over: Your genes contain the genes of a member of the S.S. and a war criminal and the genes of a Jewish woman. I will have to tell them, and they will have to find a way of dealing with it. History, history which we Germans (and Austrians) have repeatedly mucked up, as Grass says, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps coming up.”

Dasa Drndic’s Trieste is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year and one that I will be thinking about for a long time. I am hesitant to give a detailed plot summary because the way it unfolds is extraordinary and utterly horrific. It’s part family saga and part meta-fictional textbook that explores European history and exposes the horrors of the holocaust and its ramifications on the human race and the human condition. It’s a powerful meditation on lineage, legacy, and memory. Drndic’s characters, as well as the reader, are thrust into a region of Europe, passed back and forth in the theatre of war, and we see families hiding in plain sight. It’s a world of trains and their stations that for millions of people, the future dead, become the gates of hell.

Drndic’s prose has this incredible balance of the poetic and the factual. She takes us on immense, sprawling digressions but also leads us back to the main narrative. In its most horrific moments, Drndic gives us almost a step-by-step manual for the Final Solution, and it is in these moments that the reader becomes a bystander in the mass murders. She goes so far as to give you the names of the dead and their murderers. It is absolutely relentless in its brutality, and at times it’s too much to handle. She constantly reminds you that this happened, and that we, as the human race, did this to each other, and for the rest of time we have to reckon with that. In Trieste, Drndic offers no solace, no hope and no love. by @jacks_paperbacks

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a month ago

Two years ago, I started my Europe Reading Project, where I would read one book from every European country. Of all my reading projects, this one is the longest/largest, most formidable, and most fulfilling. Here is my updated stack of what I have read so far. Even in this stack of fifteen books, there are some of my favourite books of all time.

Ireland: Ulysses by James Joyce
Poland: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
Italy: Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg
Russia: Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Romania: Solenoid by Mircea Carataresc
Finland: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The United Kingdom: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Czech Republic: I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal
Austria: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Albania/Kosovo: Broken April by Ismail Kadare
Belarus: Music for the Dead and Resurrected: Poems by Valzhyna Mort
Hungary: Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Germany: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
Denmark: The Wax Child by Olga Ravn
Lithuania: White Shroud by Antanas Skema
Croatia: Trieste by Dasa Drndric by @jacks_paperbacks

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a month ago

The White Shroud by Antanas Skema

Drawing inspiration from Skema’s real-life experiences, this novel tells the story of Antanas Garsva, a Lithuanian immigrant and poet who works as an elevator operator at a big New York City hotel in the early 1950s.

Skema crafted a dynamic and moving character study that goes beyond the “Coming to America” immigrant tale. We follow Garsva’s life and struggle through jolting flashbacks and diary entries filled with his personal history and Lithuania’s history. Skema/Garsva illustrates that his country’s history is fraught with conflict between the superpowers of Russia and Germany. As these two countries took turns taking over, they picked apart Lithuania’s culture and its people to devastating effects.

What makes this book so dynamic and engaging is that our protagonist, who is not all that likeable at times, has this incredibly overactive imagination. Skema/Garsva go off on these digressions, almost like daydreams, filled with poetic scenes of philosophical beauty and theological horror. Still, they never feel meandering, and Skema always lands the plane and brings you right back to the main narrative. In these moments of flashback/daydreaming, we fully explore this man’s interior life. This book hammers home the idea that you never really know where people are coming from, what trauma they carry and why their past brought them to where they are now. by @jacks_paperbacks

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2 months ago

Rick and Jack in Croatia by Rick Harsch

Over the past week, we have all shared how much this online book community will miss Rick Harsch. Rick was truly one of a kind and a true artist in every sense of the word. His press @corona_samizdat released some of the best works of literature of the past five years. He always championed the writer and created a place where people could experiment freely. His YouTube channel/videos enlightened and entertained me, and I always looked forward to what Rick had to say, from geopolitics to book recommendations. Even though we had minimal communication, he was always a pleasure to talk to and was extremely generous in sharing his work and others’ from the press. My condolences go out to his family.

I wrote this review back in February…

Rick Harsch gives us a memoir, the only way he knows how. Rick and Jack in Croatia is part personal history and political diatribe. Told in a tone/voice similar to George Carlin or Charles Bukowski, Harsch is unapologetic in retelling moments in his life, no situation too intense or embarrassing, no image too horrifying. From discussions on chronic masturbation to the chemical compounds that make up napalm, to describing the genocide in Gaza, this book is a 62-page torrent of words; it’s like the roar of exploding rubble coming toward you. Miss you Rick. by @jacks_paperbacks

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2 months ago

As we’ve reached the mid-way point of the year, I’m already thinking about what books I’m going to prioritize for the rest of the year and for 2027. I’ve been looking at my shelves and have found a blind spot in my reading life. So I’ve decided to start another reading project, Big Books by Women. Within this stack are family sagas, courtroom dramas, historical fiction, modernist masterpieces, in-depth character studies, modern-day myths, and stream-of-consciousness madness, and I can’t wait to read them. by @jacks_paperbacks

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3 months ago

Here are my six favourite books of the year so far. Though I started A Glastonbury Romance last year, I finished it in February and parts of that book have stuck with me til now. Molloy was a strange and hilarious book accompanied with a fantastic reading group. The Sellout delivered excellent satire. The Wax Child delivered thrills and chills and Solarium was a refreshing and depressing coming of age novel. Finally the book that will probably end up being my favourite book of the year, the brutal and beautiful Fathers & Crows. I have not given up on Schattenfroh as I hope to return to it later on in the year. It’s been great seeing everyone’s top 6 and I can’t wait for what the rest of the year brings! by @jacks_paperbacks

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3 months ago

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Coming off the heels of Argall and putting down Schattenfroh for the time being, I was really craving a laugh and a good book to kick off the summer, and I found just that with Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galapagos.

In the book, we follow a classic Vonnegut cast of characters who are involved with a nature cruise to the Galapagos Archipelago, but things go very awry when it’s interrupted by quite possibly the beginning of World War Three. Through the chaos and confusion, they reach the Galapagos but are shipwrecked and begin to build a new human civilization. All this is told with blistering force and whip-smart prose. Filled with false starts, Vonnegut structures the novel like he’s giving spoilers from his own story; it’s a little jarring at first, but then you just start giggling.

For fans of The White Lotus and the film Triangle of Sadness, you will find some parallels here. In 1985, he was just so on the nose, but it never comes off as preachy or trite, and his injection of the macabre and humour is what makes this novel so much fun. Vonnegut takes on class, American interventionism/geo-politics, AI and ecological disaster and I think it does it better than any of the 21st-century satirists writing today. If you’re in a reading slump or suffering from big book fatigue, just pick up this book or any Vonnegut, for that matter, and you’ll be cured. by @jacks_paperbacks

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3 months ago

Argall: Volume Three of Seven Dreams, A Book of North American Landscapes by William T. Vollmann

“One of her many purple biographies cites a “tradition” that Pocahontas died in the last house on Stone Street. Bob, Esther and I strolled there, but it was only a McDonald’s restaurant. No wonder she died, said Bob.”

Here in this third dream, Vollmann makes his own attempt to tell the story of John Smith and Pocahontas. What we find, instead of an investigation of colonization and mass genocide is a whimsical and impressionistic legend, and more of a holocaust of the heart.

What makes this novel enjoyable and also challenging is the prose and style in which it is written. William the Blind truly steps into the role of narrator, and Agrall is presented to us almost as a Shakespearean tragedy, fully employing an Elizabethan lexical and syntactic pastiche. William the Blind is having a conversation with us more so than in the previous two dreams and his asides to audience are some of highlights of the book. Vollmann is really playing around and experimenting with typography and format, which was a refreshing switch from Fathers & Crows. You can tell he is having a lot of fun, even at the reader’s expense. In Argall, Vollmann is more of a painter than a journalist, and that will not be for everyone.

To be honest, at first, this dream was extremely hard to crack and at times I really struggled to get through it. About a third of the way into the novel, Vollmann got bogged down in the wrong places, and I feel he lost track of what he was trying to achieve. This section mostly pertains to the settlement of Jamestown, and Vollmann tried his best to make “men putting sticks in the mud and fighting about it” interesting, but it wasn’t. It really was a slog, and I usually never say this about a book, but this could have been a hundred pages shorter. [conclusion in comments] by @jacks_paperbacks

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3 months ago

Sink Hole: Poems by Jake Beka

This is a fantastic example of how wonderful bookstagram and this online book community can be. @jake_beka and I have had great conversations on here, and I was stoked to pick this one up on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Sink Hole is filled to the brim with the menacing and the macabre. These poems throttle you from empty parking lots in the suburbs to the Nepalese mountaintops, to skinhead hangouts and to Hungarian bathhouses. The work feels coated in a film of sweat, and perhaps a few drops of blood. Beka’s wordplay and imagery are fun, a little punk rock and intense. If you’re looking for something dark but not lengthy, pick up this collection. by @jacks_paperbacks

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4 months ago