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I didn't know how to read this book: each chapter is a city, the description of which is a page or so long. I wasn't sure if I should slowly, carefully examine each city as a precious gem or if I should read through voraciously to see how each tied to its neighbors. Sometimes I did both, sometimes I went back and reread. Calvino has managed to put only beautiful words on each page. I imagined that Calvino made a list of the world's most enchanting words, then built his cities by combining them: solstice and equinox, bristling, encrusted with serpentine, crevices where roots twist, and then allowed the stories to grow up around the words. Overall, just lovely. Find a beautiful place to read this book. Or find anyplace to read this book anywhere and realize that the place has become beautiful as you read.

These stories are dark, dark, dark and the characters are all either pinched and hateful or self-congratulatingly and blindly positive and hypocritical. And unless I'm forgetting somebody, they're also all really racist in a matter-of-fact way and don't realize it. It's a disturbing read, and there is no feeling of resolution or justice or redemption when they come to terrible ends, only more darkness. At first I was confused b/c I know Flannery O'Connor was religious and it didn't seem to fit with the worldview of these stories, but then I remembered that she was old-school Catholic and it made more sense.

Pragmatism made simple? Maybe not. Bu then philosophy of any kind doesn't lend itself to simplicity, and as for American pragmatism this might be a close as you get.