It's all in the timing

The world pays attention to me. It notices the fact that I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from Very Long Books, and so it goes out, and it causes some Very Long Books to be published that, were I not on said hiatus, I would probably read immediately. (Neither of these books, mind you, is by Don DeLillo--though during a rather energetic round of bowling this weekend, I may have gotten myself caught in the cross-fire of some sort of drunken blood oath to read Underworld this year. [But Friend Chris, the other half of the oath, is somewhere inside Gravity's Rainbow right now, and then he's planning on doing Infinite Jest next, so I figure I've got at least eight or nine months of breathing room before he brings in a truckload of ladies to bear witness as he starts calling me a scrawny little-book reading wimp, at which point I'll have to drop whatever Chekhov I'm working on so I can throw down in order to show him and the ladies--well, okay, it's mostly the ladies I'm concerned about here--what's what. Yeah, that's right: in my town, books are naught but a flimsy excuse for manly displays of valor.])

First book was just nominated by the LitBlog Co-Op as their Winter 2007 Read This! selection: Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I'm glad they nominated it, because it does look interesting, but it's one of those many books that I've seen lots of references to recently, which has upped the white noise quotient surrounding it in my brain, and has accordingly decreased the odds that I will actually read it. Looks like the paperback is due out in August, which, considering my current reading schedule and my tendency to play fall-behind, catch-up on the LitBlog Co-Op's picks, sounds about right.

The other, even longer, book, would be Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. I like novels about India or by Indian authors, but it's been a while since I've read anything in that vein, and this one sounds like a doozy. To be fair I started reading Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain last year or the year before and sputtered out on it, for reasons I can't recall. From the sounds of it, though, there's no way I'd lose interest midway through this new one. There's reviews everywhere: I'll be a good hometown boy and point to the Cleveland Plain Dealer review.

Then I'll note that, while this review at the Toronto Star is otherwise decent and enthusiastic, it does open with one of the more offensive paragraphs I've seen in my travels. ("I know what you're thinking. You take one look at that page count of Vikram Chandra's novel--916--and lament: "Do I really need another epic novel about India? After Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children? After Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance?") One might ask whether we really need another novel about white people in America after Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye, before jumping up on one's desk and shouting "U! S! A! U! S! A!" at top volume. Perhaps with foot-stomping. And fist-pumping. The answer, to this and the question posed in the review, is: yes, duh. I know I haven't gone out of my way on this blog to specifically advocate reading outside one's cultural comfort zone, but that doesn't mean I think we North Americans need to go out of our way to look like total assholes about ourselves.