Chattiness

The book about the dust bowl that I read last week was awesome. Riveting. Terrifying. I read it like it was a novel I could not put down. The book shocked me with my own ignorance of just what that term "dust bowl" really meant. I think, in my defense, in my American History class in high school, it was nothing more than a footnote to the Real Story of the Great Depression, which happened in the cities. But I can't hold myself accountable for every question I've never yet learned I should not only find answers to, but ask in the first place. I already feel guilty enough about the unanswered questions I do know exist.

Something to be said, in any case, about the fact that I went from a fictional account of watery apocalypse in The Children's Hospital to a historical account of apocalypse by earth and wind in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. But then it seems like every book I've read this year has been speaking to other books I've read this year with a frighteningly high level of chattiness. I really ought to be keeping a chart, because it's freaked me out more than once, how eerie the connections have been.

As for lunchtime reading, I'm almost done with Sleep by Stephen Dixon. I don't love every story in that book, but when I do love a story, I love it hard, the way a man loves a woman in a bar who he's talking to for the first time in that moment she first surprises him with some unexpected bit of connectivity. As someone who has read enough of the guy's books to think I've got a pretty good sense of his "game," I have to say I've been pleased to find myself surprised on more than one occasion. Eventually I'll be closer to the book while I'm blogging, and I'll tally up a list of "new most favoritist short stories ever" from the table of contents. I think this is the most pure fun I've had reading his work since I did Interstate and Frog. As is, only two more stories out of the book to go. (I've already read the closer, "Sleep," which, yeah. Wow.) I've already got an order in for a copy of that Stories of Stephen Dixon collection that's floating around out there, which will probably queue-jump the other Dixon books I have lined up on the TBR pile.

My next lunchtime short story reading obsession is probably going to be Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box. About whose passing I still don't even know what to say. But when I say it, I hope to hell it's funny. (My god, though, am I glad I got to see him talk when I had the chance.)

Right now at night I'm reading Thomas Pynchon again. Vineland. I'm liking it. I don't know that I'll get to Mason & Dixon and Against the Day before the year's out--like I may have foolishly once planned on doing--but we'll see what happens.

Also, there seems to be a lot of John Barth chatter amongst the litblog hepcats lately? Am I wrong? I read The Floating Opera and The End of the Road earlier this year, both of which I've long been meaning to say more about. For now suffice it to say they were fine little pieces of existential fiction at a time when fine little pieces of existential fiction were perfectly fine with me. Decent chance I'm going to start tackling The Sot-Weed Factor next (which I feel that someone out there is reading right now but forgive me for not remembering who you are at the moment?). So hopefully I'll be contributing to the upswing of Barth-chattiness in due time.

Elsewhere, from the department of "things I've read that other people have now read and have talked about online in ways that are probably more cogent and coherent than anything I've strung together by this point," Matthew Tiffany liked the book The End of Mr. Y but not as much as some others of us did, Ana María Correa is already looking forward to re-reading The Exquisite (you and me both!), and Levi Asher finds your loyalty to Cormac McCarthy....displeasing.