It's been a while since I've talked about what I've read recently, which is a crying shame, because while I can play the linky-linky game with the best of 'em, what I really get a daily jonesin' for is to tell you, dear faithful reader, what books are so totally, hardcorely awesome that you should sell your house for the dough to buy them and quit your job for the time to read them. Unfortunately to do so requires me to read books, which I've gotten lazy about and distracted from recently, no thanks to recent specific major life changes that have affected the chemical balance of my brain. Yes yes, you guessed correctly--I've become William T. Vollmann and I've started smoking crack. It's just like coffee, only more so!
You can also sort of blame Philip Roth, whose The Plot Against America, for me, alternates between being entirely soul-consumingly engrossing, and being cross-eyed medicine-takingly slow. I've gotten sort of mired in it even when I've been liking it--one of those books where I'll set it down after reading ten pages thinking, "Yeah, that's amazing," and I kind of don't want to pick it back up. It's weird. This is actually my first experience with Roth so I do wonder if it's a case of "should have started elsewhere," or if this is how I'd react to all his stuff. Or maybe it's a result of all the hype surrounding the book--hype, eh, I'd love to have some in my favor but it always seems to drag me down when it comes to reading someone else's stuff. None of this should be construed as a slam on Roth--I mean, he's Roth, and I'm some internet jerk, so it wouldn't matter anyway. My girlfriend probably put it best when she said Roth just wasn't my groove right now. I can buy that, enough to finish Plot and then come back to him again later, someday. I'm intrigued enough, I guess.
What's really dropping the dried leaves on my fire right now is the thought of reading some Mary Gaitskill. (And somewhere, a secret society of internet anti-nerds just made me public enemy number one, for that sentence alone.) Her books have started rolling into TDAOC headquarters the last few days--seems someone who shall remain nameless, who may or may not have been me, went on a drunken Amazon ordering binge sometime recently. Minus the actual drunkeness. I'm hoping to at least get through Veronica by December, but if I can sneak in some extra stuff by then as well, I won't complain. Unless I don't like her writing, then I will complain. Except probably not, because she's Mary Gaitskill, and I'm some internet jerk. Right.
2 comments:
My reaction to various of Roth's books to date has been much the same: ten pages is the most of his writing I seem to be able to take at one sitting (and I will generally *like* those ten pages, too...)
I seem to remember more than one 10-page day while I was reading Plot, yeah...
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