(Previously on Battlestar Haiku.)
Oh, Gaius Baltar,
You crazy motherfucker.
Swim, man. Swim like mad.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
Coffee, books, and sex appeal
Here's a handy guide to help you figure out where you land on the TDAOC Hierarchy of Sex Appeal:
- If you are Julianne Moore, you are the sexiest person in the room.
- If Julianne Moore is not in the room, and if you are handing me a cup of coffee, you are the sexiest person in the room, regardless of how you are dressed.
- If you are Julianne Moore, and you are handing me a cup of coffee, you are impossibly perfect, and my brain would rather melt than attempt to comprehend the mythical levels of your sex appeal.
- While the remaining levels of the hierarchy are completely predictable to anybody who follows the adventures and thinkings of the TDAOC staff while yet being far too complex and intricate to be accurately written out in a hierarchical format, it may be suggested that one's stature may potentially be enhanced via use of certain advanced mate-attracting pheromonal scent technologies. While first-hand scientific analysis of this theory has yet to be performed, grant application study proposals are being accepted for review.
They were going to be The Hundred Visions and Revisions, but they're rather modest sorts
Not quite book related, but still awesome: if you have yourself one of them MySpace accounts the kids are all hopped up on these days, go befriend The Muttering Retreats. They're three friends of mine who have set out to become the most polite band in the history of indie-rock. (Long-time readers of this blog may recognize Chris as being the oft-alluded-to-on-this-blog Friend Chris, who, turns out, has talents beyond "ability to be alluded to on half-rate local litblog." Huh! Who'd'a thunk, right?)
If you're in town, near town, or understand the definition of the word "town" on April 13, they'll be playing their debut show at the Beachland, opening for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Which, I mean: hello, awesome. So show up early and buy them beer. I imagine they will accept graciously.
If you're in town, near town, or understand the definition of the word "town" on April 13, they'll be playing their debut show at the Beachland, opening for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Which, I mean: hello, awesome. So show up early and buy them beer. I imagine they will accept graciously.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
In which your humble narrator attempts to say something about The Coast of Akron but probably says more about himself than anything else
I.
I liked The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller. Really. A lot. Like, I think you should read it. Consider it a suggestion, or a recommendation, or a command to anybody into the sorts of things I am into. Things I am into, for those of you who have lost your notes or who are just now joining me, include (but are not limited to!) things that are funny in sad ways and sad in funny ways. Both of which qualities this book exhibits in fine quantity.
But so you know I haven't flown over the edge of reason, I'll employ the clever book reviewer's technique of admitting that the book is flawed. This makes me look critical and sexy-keen, and helps justify my crazed raving about the book being awesome.
The book's primary flaw is that it is not propulsive. Not that it's a trudge to read it, but it's not a particularly fast read. This book--unlike, say, Original Bliss, by A. L. Kennedy, which I've already mentioned, which kept me up well past bedtime the night I started reading it--was not hard for me to put down.
It's a plot/structure thing. The book is a miniature dysfunctional family epic, focusing on the world-renowned self-portrait artist Lowell Haven, his ex-wife Jenny, their daughter Merit, and Lowell's gay lover (and friend/acquaintance of Jenny's since high school) (and very very very wealthy) Fergus. The book shifts perspectives between a present-day first person account by Fergus, a third person view of Merit, and journal entries of Jenny's from the late-70s/early-80s. The book is structured such that it is established early on that these characters are all initially separate from each other, and that they will be brought together by the end of the book at a party, where things will go more or less as you expect they would.
Plotwise, that's about it. When you realize how the book will play out, there isn't much of a "What's going to happen next?" thing that drives you to keep reading. Being the sort of person who is often easily distracted by bright shiny objects, the Internet, or stray puffs of air that might exist somewhere else at any given moment, I found it easier to put the book down than I might have wished.
II.
So now then. I've done the critical blah blah blah thing. Now I can talk about how much ass this book kicks.
This book kicks so much ass. I'd say it's not even funny how much ass this book kicks, but part of what the book kicks so much ass at is being funny. So that's out.
There's a ton of good stuff going on in this book, more than enough to offset the structure flaw thing. (Which, really? Not a flaw. Not at all. Just something to keep in mind when you're picking which book you want to read next.) When you first pick the book up, it might not seem obvious that the book does have an agenda. There's a lot of weird things happening, and there's a slightly surreal tone to it, and it might seem like much of it isn't connected to any of the rest of it. Picking up all these pieces and seeing how they connect and resonate becomes part of the fun of the book. (It's far less grad-student-nerdy treasure-hunty than I'm making it sound, don't worry.) In time (and it would probably take less time for better readers than I), though I felt a bit (pleasantly) lost in the early stages of my reading, a portrait of the book's intentions formed in my mind.
Which leads me to my next clever critical book reviewer gambit, the Big Bad-ass Bold Claim: in The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller tackles the idea of ego and identity the way David Foster Wallace addressed entertainment and addiction in Infinite Jest.
(Oh, yes. I went there. I went there hard.)
The DFW name-dropping doesn't stop there. Wait for it...wait for it...go: If in Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace created the PGOAT, or the Prettiest Girl of All Time, Adrienne Miller, in The Coast of Akron, created, in Lowell Haven, the MEMOAT: the Most Egotistical Man of all Time.
(That right there? That's the sound of the extra point kick being good.)
Lowell, the self-portrait artist, the MEMOAT. Dude's bonkers. Of the four main characters, we spend the least time with him. But he's the catalyst of everything that happens, no doubt. Here's where I'll back off, and suggest that you're best off seeing for yourself the limitlessness of his self-obsession. He does things that, when you see them happen, they're somehow both glaringly obvious and surprisingly awesome. I'm not sure how many times I found myself saying to myself, "Of course he would do that," while still laughing about it.
The theme of self-portraiture runs through the entire book. It's no mistake, I'm certain, that Jenny, as a young artist, is revealed primarily through journal entries. Then there's Fergus, who, trapped in Lowell's shadow (and his own inability to create himself in his own image), in a futile fit of escapism, writes a series of over-inflated magazine profile pieces about himself. Pretty much everything about the guy seems futile.
Understatement alert: these three characters have issues. With themselves, and with each other.
Then there's Merit. Oh, Merit. Merit's the result of the mess of Jenny and Lowell and Fergus, three of the most self-involved characters I've read recently. Merit seems to be the weird flip-side of the equation; she's grown up to be her own mess, but unlike her parents and "uncle," who are all messed up in each other because they are so self-assured (except when they aren't), Merit's got nothing. She's a self-questioning placeless seemingly empty mess who's desperately looking to be filled in. (Cough. Cough.)
In an interview at small spiral notebook, Adrienne Miller says, "Readers might have their own take on this, but, to me, Fergus is both the stylistic and emotional heart of the book." It's true that I do have my own take on this, in that it was the Merit chapters I felt most drawn to and into. Though, Fergus definitely had some of great stylistic quirks. Another one of those odd pleasures that do keep you coming back to the book is seeing the ways in which he's (consciously or not) glommed on to the personalities of the other characters in the book. And...
And, yeah. There's a lot going on here. Did I mention this book kicks ass? Man. This book kicks some serious ass.
III.
There's a lot more I could talk about. The "Ohio"-ness of the book, the heartbreaking use of the blimp, the dead-on office humor (and whether office humor isn't perhaps cheap these days), Merit's husband and step-daughter, the other secondary characters (who fill out the margins of the story with a rich level of color), the other literary influences/references that the book may or may not exhibit (I really need to read Mrs. Dalloway soon because I suspect there might be a Mrs. Dalloway thing going on here but I'm not sure), the whole Randy thing, the animals, all of it. But instead I'd like to close off this post with a brief look at one of my favorite topics: me.
Me me me.
Oh...me.
I liked The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller. Really. A lot. Like, I think you should read it. Consider it a suggestion, or a recommendation, or a command to anybody into the sorts of things I am into. Things I am into, for those of you who have lost your notes or who are just now joining me, include (but are not limited to!) things that are funny in sad ways and sad in funny ways. Both of which qualities this book exhibits in fine quantity.
But so you know I haven't flown over the edge of reason, I'll employ the clever book reviewer's technique of admitting that the book is flawed. This makes me look critical and sexy-keen, and helps justify my crazed raving about the book being awesome.
The book's primary flaw is that it is not propulsive. Not that it's a trudge to read it, but it's not a particularly fast read. This book--unlike, say, Original Bliss, by A. L. Kennedy, which I've already mentioned, which kept me up well past bedtime the night I started reading it--was not hard for me to put down.
It's a plot/structure thing. The book is a miniature dysfunctional family epic, focusing on the world-renowned self-portrait artist Lowell Haven, his ex-wife Jenny, their daughter Merit, and Lowell's gay lover (and friend/acquaintance of Jenny's since high school) (and very very very wealthy) Fergus. The book shifts perspectives between a present-day first person account by Fergus, a third person view of Merit, and journal entries of Jenny's from the late-70s/early-80s. The book is structured such that it is established early on that these characters are all initially separate from each other, and that they will be brought together by the end of the book at a party, where things will go more or less as you expect they would.
Plotwise, that's about it. When you realize how the book will play out, there isn't much of a "What's going to happen next?" thing that drives you to keep reading. Being the sort of person who is often easily distracted by bright shiny objects, the Internet, or stray puffs of air that might exist somewhere else at any given moment, I found it easier to put the book down than I might have wished.
II.
So now then. I've done the critical blah blah blah thing. Now I can talk about how much ass this book kicks.
This book kicks so much ass. I'd say it's not even funny how much ass this book kicks, but part of what the book kicks so much ass at is being funny. So that's out.
There's a ton of good stuff going on in this book, more than enough to offset the structure flaw thing. (Which, really? Not a flaw. Not at all. Just something to keep in mind when you're picking which book you want to read next.) When you first pick the book up, it might not seem obvious that the book does have an agenda. There's a lot of weird things happening, and there's a slightly surreal tone to it, and it might seem like much of it isn't connected to any of the rest of it. Picking up all these pieces and seeing how they connect and resonate becomes part of the fun of the book. (It's far less grad-student-nerdy treasure-hunty than I'm making it sound, don't worry.) In time (and it would probably take less time for better readers than I), though I felt a bit (pleasantly) lost in the early stages of my reading, a portrait of the book's intentions formed in my mind.
Which leads me to my next clever critical book reviewer gambit, the Big Bad-ass Bold Claim: in The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller tackles the idea of ego and identity the way David Foster Wallace addressed entertainment and addiction in Infinite Jest.
(Oh, yes. I went there. I went there hard.)
The DFW name-dropping doesn't stop there. Wait for it...wait for it...go: If in Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace created the PGOAT, or the Prettiest Girl of All Time, Adrienne Miller, in The Coast of Akron, created, in Lowell Haven, the MEMOAT: the Most Egotistical Man of all Time.
(That right there? That's the sound of the extra point kick being good.)
Lowell, the self-portrait artist, the MEMOAT. Dude's bonkers. Of the four main characters, we spend the least time with him. But he's the catalyst of everything that happens, no doubt. Here's where I'll back off, and suggest that you're best off seeing for yourself the limitlessness of his self-obsession. He does things that, when you see them happen, they're somehow both glaringly obvious and surprisingly awesome. I'm not sure how many times I found myself saying to myself, "Of course he would do that," while still laughing about it.
The theme of self-portraiture runs through the entire book. It's no mistake, I'm certain, that Jenny, as a young artist, is revealed primarily through journal entries. Then there's Fergus, who, trapped in Lowell's shadow (and his own inability to create himself in his own image), in a futile fit of escapism, writes a series of over-inflated magazine profile pieces about himself. Pretty much everything about the guy seems futile.
Understatement alert: these three characters have issues. With themselves, and with each other.
Then there's Merit. Oh, Merit. Merit's the result of the mess of Jenny and Lowell and Fergus, three of the most self-involved characters I've read recently. Merit seems to be the weird flip-side of the equation; she's grown up to be her own mess, but unlike her parents and "uncle," who are all messed up in each other because they are so self-assured (except when they aren't), Merit's got nothing. She's a self-questioning placeless seemingly empty mess who's desperately looking to be filled in. (Cough. Cough.)
In an interview at small spiral notebook, Adrienne Miller says, "Readers might have their own take on this, but, to me, Fergus is both the stylistic and emotional heart of the book." It's true that I do have my own take on this, in that it was the Merit chapters I felt most drawn to and into. Though, Fergus definitely had some of great stylistic quirks. Another one of those odd pleasures that do keep you coming back to the book is seeing the ways in which he's (consciously or not) glommed on to the personalities of the other characters in the book. And...
And, yeah. There's a lot going on here. Did I mention this book kicks ass? Man. This book kicks some serious ass.
III.
There's a lot more I could talk about. The "Ohio"-ness of the book, the heartbreaking use of the blimp, the dead-on office humor (and whether office humor isn't perhaps cheap these days), Merit's husband and step-daughter, the other secondary characters (who fill out the margins of the story with a rich level of color), the other literary influences/references that the book may or may not exhibit (I really need to read Mrs. Dalloway soon because I suspect there might be a Mrs. Dalloway thing going on here but I'm not sure), the whole Randy thing, the animals, all of it. But instead I'd like to close off this post with a brief look at one of my favorite topics: me.
Me me me.
Oh...me.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Thesis statement
I keep trying to say lots of things about this book, but I haven't yet gotten my thoughts sorted out well enough to make them make sense to you, which means I haven't even gotten around to stating the main point yet, so I'm going to go ahead and do that now, laying out what amounts to little more than a thesis statement, one which I'd like to support with evidence and analysis and discussion when I'm feeling slightly more mentally and life-ally organized, but at least in the meantime I can get this much out there for your consideration, this one key point, which is this: The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller is an excellent novel that kicks all sorts of ass all over the place, and I happily recommend it to anybody looking for a strangely moving yet equally hilarious read.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Cleveland stuff: Bloomsday Book Club, JCU writers reading, Canadian writers series
Spotted this in the current issue of Cool Cleveland:
I'm tempted to join in--I think the only way I'll ever read Finnegans Wake is if I've got other people dragging me kicking and screaming through it, or, like, if a cute girl said I should read it, and she maybe blinked at me while she said so--but reality is I will likely wuss out, what with all those other important things I do, like, uhm. Stuff. With things. And, uh, stuff.
Also, not sure whether I'll make this, though I'm sure it promises to be a yabba-dabba-Bilgere-tastic time:
Nothing on the JCU site about that, but I do see that the Red, White and Read: Canadian Writers Come to Cleveland series is having a second go-round this year. Featured authors are David Bezmozgis, Michael Redhill, and Alistair MacLeod. Check the JCU site for dates and times.
Bloomsday Book Club
Book club devoted to the last novel written by James Joyce, the legendary Finnegans Wake. The group will slowly tackle one of the most renowned and respected works in the English language. Group kicks off on Thu 1/25 at 6PM. Loganberry Books, Shaker Hts.
I'm tempted to join in--I think the only way I'll ever read Finnegans Wake is if I've got other people dragging me kicking and screaming through it, or, like, if a cute girl said I should read it, and she maybe blinked at me while she said so--but reality is I will likely wuss out, what with all those other important things I do, like, uhm. Stuff. With things. And, uh, stuff.
Also, not sure whether I'll make this, though I'm sure it promises to be a yabba-dabba-Bilgere-tastic time:
Get Lit features award-winning local writers/John Carroll University faculty members George Bilgere, Paula McLain, Steven Hayward, Philip Metres, Mary Weems and Sarah Willis in a special poetry performance Wed 1/24 at 8PM. No-cost event takes place at JCU's Rodman Hall, 20700 N. Park Blvd., University Hts. Call 397-4528 for details.
Nothing on the JCU site about that, but I do see that the Red, White and Read: Canadian Writers Come to Cleveland series is having a second go-round this year. Featured authors are David Bezmozgis, Michael Redhill, and Alistair MacLeod. Check the JCU site for dates and times.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Book giveaway
Get thyself to The Litblog Co-op, where the discussion of Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves begins with a book giveaway contest. Sounds like an interesting title. (One of these days, I really am going to go into seclusion, and read all the books they've suggested but which I haven't gotten to yet. My favorite nominated titles have been ones that weren't selected for the Read This! pick.)
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Favorites, and, A New Favorite
I.
The idea of favorites has been bugging me lately. As in, I don't know what mine are. I think it's a matter of definition: somewhere along the line, I maybe bought a little bit into deconstructionism. It makes it hard to pick out absolutes when all you see is difference. You say a favorite is a thing liked the most. I ask: Liked how? Liked when? Liked to what end? It all becomes muddy if you think about it too hard. Which I encourage you not to do. I prefer to be a source of joy, not nasty Tylenol-commercial-level headaches.
Still, tough to talk about things (such as, ooooo-o-o-o-oh, books, to take one purely random example) that can be liked without hinting at the fact that there exists some kind of ultimate Platonic-ideal form of "liking," as well as whatever the opposite of that is. (I skipped out on Philosophy after my 101 college class. The Linguistics class I took really didn't count for much more than my own amusement. I mean, that stuff was sexy and all, pretty to look at, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't exactly accessible to me in any useful way. Which, come to think of it, probably summed up how I saw most campus sorority girls. But that's another post, entirely.) During my reading this week, I came up with an alternate, and practical, way of defining who my favorite authors are. You can play along at home: ask yourself, about a specific author, whether you would drop anything and everything in your hands (excluding babies, and very expensive and fragile crystals, both of which, in a pinch, can be sold on the black market, to enable the purchase of new books) in order to read a new book by that author at the moment of publication.
I rather like the strict black-and-white nature of the question. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of authors I'd say yes to: Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan. I mean, duh. Jeff Noon, Steve Erickson, yes. Mary Gaitskill, I think I would like to give the nod to her, here. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of names here (and there are more than a few who I would like to read new books by but who I might feel okay waiting on). I like that it's a small number of names, in any case. Makes me look like a smart chap, the sort who has standards, and is therefore deserving of your trust.
Things get knotty after that: while, for some definition or another, Infinite Jest could be considered one of my favorite novels, David Foster Wallace himself is curiously a no to drop-everything question. But! He will become an unholy-levels-of-dread-and-affirmation level yes the moment I learn that he is going to publish a novel. I suspect the same thing is going on for Jonathan Franzen, too. I suspect it is assholes like me who make it hard for authors like these fellows to publish new novels. For which I apologize, while also shrugging, and saying, hey, what can you do, right?
Some other big TDAOC-endorsed names also get voted no, like William T. Vollmann and Stephen Dixon, though they would be voted yes to another potential (and far more broad) favorites classification question, that of whether you can conceivably see yourself systematically working your way through the author's entire back catalogue, however large it may be, in however much time it might take. This question, perhaps obviously, leads to a far longer list of names, and makes me look like a far less-exacting, more-well-read, quite-likeable sort of chap. Plus it opens the field of play to dead authors, who, like blocks of expensive cheese, are categorically incapable of writing new books, but remain very nice in their own peculiar ways.
I've gone through this little exercise as a lengthy lead-in to an exciting conclusion: I think I've found a new favorite author. And not just in the loose Tier Number Two sense (though, definitely, yes, to that), but in the rather more elite "Whip out your tiki torches and loud shirts because we're having ourselves an up-all-night author party" Tier Number One sense.
Honest. It's really and truly all sorts of exciting. What can I say: some people get the power up and win the game; I fall in love with authors. (Well, when I'm not getting the power up and winning the game, at least, which, yeah, that also sort of rules.)
I just, uh, hope Kazuo Ishiguro and Jennifer Egan aren't jealous types.
II.
A. L. Kennedy.
I read her most recent novel, Paradise, sometime in 2005, and I liked it plenty. I guess it took a long walk through the wilderness to see just how much I liked her writing, though, since I only now got around to reading an earlier novel of hers, Original Bliss. To be certain, I've read plenty of damn fine books in between those two. And yet, after returning to her familiar yet distinct prose, I now feel a little bit more guilty about not getting back to her stuff sooner.
The voice of Original Bliss is sparser than I remember that of Paradise being, which makes sense in that the prose of Paradise had to keep up with the woozy drunken mindset of its narrator, while that of Original Bliss had to work in a much tighter (but hardly less complex) space. Yet it seems to me that the two books share some obvious amount of genetic material. There's some definite sibling-resemblance thing going on there. As if this lurched-in-the-gut feeling both books left me with could have only come about through some family-taught technique.
This is where, were I studious, I'd spill out ten thousand words or so about Original Bliss, the story, the themes, the ideas, and the novel's voice, and I'd point to examples of everything I'm talking about. (Examples of simply amazing writing abound throughout the book. I had to force myself, now and then, to stop adding asterisks to the margins, and acknowledge that really, I just wanted to draw a big huge star on the front cover, because, just, all of it, the whole damn thing. Really.) It's that kind of book. It's a short one, which offers more rewards than it can seemingly contain.
But, you know I'm a lazy blogger and all, so instead I'm going to try to say just one thing about the book here. I love the way Kennedy's prose tosses out these bursts of sudden, devastating color, in a way that seems blunt but breathlessly effortless. It's like she finds holes in her prose and fills them with zigs and zags and a general sense of looseness that, really, how can all that be there, on the page? How can prose feel both like tight structured prose and a real live brain?
Comes down to insane excellence in word choice, I think. There's a point early in the book that, when I reached it, made me pretty much totally lose my shit. The two main characters of the novel are having a conversation. They make an awkward (understatement!) pair, one that probably should never have happened, but somehow did. During their conversation, when things were beginning to go a little more fluidly for them, there was a moment of silence, one that "blundered" between them.
"Blundered," seriously, are you shitting me?
Maybe you had to be there, but it's the kind of moment that, it wasn't so much a word usage, as a thermonuclear gigaton word deployment, it's so deadly, and perfect, and accurate, and summary of not just that moment of the book, but, in effect, every preceding page of the novel. I imagine Kennedy had to get some kind of military clearance before going there. Like, what form do you fill out for that? For tossing a live grenade into the middle of a bubble bath that was already a bit too hot to begin with?
Here's the compliment that, I guess, only makes sense if you're not just a reader, but someone struggling to write your own fiction, as well: that "blundered," it immediately, and almost unfairly, rose the bar I've set for myself and my own fiction writing. Which would be great if I were a published somebody. But I'm not even close to being that yet, so, you know: wow, damn. Discouraging, or challenging? I feel optimistic this week, so I'll go with challenging, but, damn, had I been in a particular down mood, when I'd hit that sentence, I'd have hung up on my writing career before it ever thought about maybe considering giving me a call.
Not that that's the only explosive moment of the book. Through and through, these words breathe, and speak, and make me want to go on, and on, and on about them, but I read another book right after it, one that I also want to say things about, maybe sometime in the next month, and, well. Yeah.
Yeah.
Day, A. L. Kennedy's new book, comes out in April. No idea if that goes for the U.S. or not. I would not mind if it did.
The idea of favorites has been bugging me lately. As in, I don't know what mine are. I think it's a matter of definition: somewhere along the line, I maybe bought a little bit into deconstructionism. It makes it hard to pick out absolutes when all you see is difference. You say a favorite is a thing liked the most. I ask: Liked how? Liked when? Liked to what end? It all becomes muddy if you think about it too hard. Which I encourage you not to do. I prefer to be a source of joy, not nasty Tylenol-commercial-level headaches.
Still, tough to talk about things (such as, ooooo-o-o-o-oh, books, to take one purely random example) that can be liked without hinting at the fact that there exists some kind of ultimate Platonic-ideal form of "liking," as well as whatever the opposite of that is. (I skipped out on Philosophy after my 101 college class. The Linguistics class I took really didn't count for much more than my own amusement. I mean, that stuff was sexy and all, pretty to look at, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't exactly accessible to me in any useful way. Which, come to think of it, probably summed up how I saw most campus sorority girls. But that's another post, entirely.) During my reading this week, I came up with an alternate, and practical, way of defining who my favorite authors are. You can play along at home: ask yourself, about a specific author, whether you would drop anything and everything in your hands (excluding babies, and very expensive and fragile crystals, both of which, in a pinch, can be sold on the black market, to enable the purchase of new books) in order to read a new book by that author at the moment of publication.
I rather like the strict black-and-white nature of the question. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of authors I'd say yes to: Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan. I mean, duh. Jeff Noon, Steve Erickson, yes. Mary Gaitskill, I think I would like to give the nod to her, here. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of names here (and there are more than a few who I would like to read new books by but who I might feel okay waiting on). I like that it's a small number of names, in any case. Makes me look like a smart chap, the sort who has standards, and is therefore deserving of your trust.
Things get knotty after that: while, for some definition or another, Infinite Jest could be considered one of my favorite novels, David Foster Wallace himself is curiously a no to drop-everything question. But! He will become an unholy-levels-of-dread-and-affirmation level yes the moment I learn that he is going to publish a novel. I suspect the same thing is going on for Jonathan Franzen, too. I suspect it is assholes like me who make it hard for authors like these fellows to publish new novels. For which I apologize, while also shrugging, and saying, hey, what can you do, right?
Some other big TDAOC-endorsed names also get voted no, like William T. Vollmann and Stephen Dixon, though they would be voted yes to another potential (and far more broad) favorites classification question, that of whether you can conceivably see yourself systematically working your way through the author's entire back catalogue, however large it may be, in however much time it might take. This question, perhaps obviously, leads to a far longer list of names, and makes me look like a far less-exacting, more-well-read, quite-likeable sort of chap. Plus it opens the field of play to dead authors, who, like blocks of expensive cheese, are categorically incapable of writing new books, but remain very nice in their own peculiar ways.
I've gone through this little exercise as a lengthy lead-in to an exciting conclusion: I think I've found a new favorite author. And not just in the loose Tier Number Two sense (though, definitely, yes, to that), but in the rather more elite "Whip out your tiki torches and loud shirts because we're having ourselves an up-all-night author party" Tier Number One sense.
Honest. It's really and truly all sorts of exciting. What can I say: some people get the power up and win the game; I fall in love with authors. (Well, when I'm not getting the power up and winning the game, at least, which, yeah, that also sort of rules.)
I just, uh, hope Kazuo Ishiguro and Jennifer Egan aren't jealous types.
II.
A. L. Kennedy.
I read her most recent novel, Paradise, sometime in 2005, and I liked it plenty. I guess it took a long walk through the wilderness to see just how much I liked her writing, though, since I only now got around to reading an earlier novel of hers, Original Bliss. To be certain, I've read plenty of damn fine books in between those two. And yet, after returning to her familiar yet distinct prose, I now feel a little bit more guilty about not getting back to her stuff sooner.
The voice of Original Bliss is sparser than I remember that of Paradise being, which makes sense in that the prose of Paradise had to keep up with the woozy drunken mindset of its narrator, while that of Original Bliss had to work in a much tighter (but hardly less complex) space. Yet it seems to me that the two books share some obvious amount of genetic material. There's some definite sibling-resemblance thing going on there. As if this lurched-in-the-gut feeling both books left me with could have only come about through some family-taught technique.
This is where, were I studious, I'd spill out ten thousand words or so about Original Bliss, the story, the themes, the ideas, and the novel's voice, and I'd point to examples of everything I'm talking about. (Examples of simply amazing writing abound throughout the book. I had to force myself, now and then, to stop adding asterisks to the margins, and acknowledge that really, I just wanted to draw a big huge star on the front cover, because, just, all of it, the whole damn thing. Really.) It's that kind of book. It's a short one, which offers more rewards than it can seemingly contain.
But, you know I'm a lazy blogger and all, so instead I'm going to try to say just one thing about the book here. I love the way Kennedy's prose tosses out these bursts of sudden, devastating color, in a way that seems blunt but breathlessly effortless. It's like she finds holes in her prose and fills them with zigs and zags and a general sense of looseness that, really, how can all that be there, on the page? How can prose feel both like tight structured prose and a real live brain?
Comes down to insane excellence in word choice, I think. There's a point early in the book that, when I reached it, made me pretty much totally lose my shit. The two main characters of the novel are having a conversation. They make an awkward (understatement!) pair, one that probably should never have happened, but somehow did. During their conversation, when things were beginning to go a little more fluidly for them, there was a moment of silence, one that "blundered" between them.
"Blundered," seriously, are you shitting me?
Maybe you had to be there, but it's the kind of moment that, it wasn't so much a word usage, as a thermonuclear gigaton word deployment, it's so deadly, and perfect, and accurate, and summary of not just that moment of the book, but, in effect, every preceding page of the novel. I imagine Kennedy had to get some kind of military clearance before going there. Like, what form do you fill out for that? For tossing a live grenade into the middle of a bubble bath that was already a bit too hot to begin with?
Here's the compliment that, I guess, only makes sense if you're not just a reader, but someone struggling to write your own fiction, as well: that "blundered," it immediately, and almost unfairly, rose the bar I've set for myself and my own fiction writing. Which would be great if I were a published somebody. But I'm not even close to being that yet, so, you know: wow, damn. Discouraging, or challenging? I feel optimistic this week, so I'll go with challenging, but, damn, had I been in a particular down mood, when I'd hit that sentence, I'd have hung up on my writing career before it ever thought about maybe considering giving me a call.
Not that that's the only explosive moment of the book. Through and through, these words breathe, and speak, and make me want to go on, and on, and on about them, but I read another book right after it, one that I also want to say things about, maybe sometime in the next month, and, well. Yeah.
Yeah.
Day, A. L. Kennedy's new book, comes out in April. No idea if that goes for the U.S. or not. I would not mind if it did.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Poetry Appreciation Week(s) at Counterbalance
Over at Counterbalance, Callie's been hosting a Poetry Appreciation Week that has, in the way the best timelines do, spilled over into something longer than itself. Callie was kind enough to solicit some thoughts from me, but being statistically unable to get my literary shit together, I haven't yet managed to transpose the sweet music of my own genius onto pixels. But please do help me assuage my guilt by checking out Callie's thoughts and those shared by other litbloggers with a far shorter idea-to-action pipeline than I myself possess.
(Also, I can't help but point out that it looks like Oscar and Kacey would not do well together in book club. Only guessing, here.)
(Also, I can't help but point out that it looks like Oscar and Kacey would not do well together in book club. Only guessing, here.)
Someone call the Karma Police to arrest this man
You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of authors being forced to use their sex appeal to sell books. First it was John "The Romantic" Keats and then it was Zadie "Quite a Lady" Smith and then we had Marisha "What a Dish-a" Pessl and now we have this. It's an outrage! A practical travesty! It's...
Oh, wait, that's actually an article about some new "greatest book ever" list. It's not about Tom Wolfe being "the hotness." Right. Sorry about that. Got hypnotized by the shirt.
The list, well, there's some new book out, and it's about some writers, who picked best books, then some other people worked mathematical voo-doo magic on it, and came up with a meta-list, and, well, you think it's wrong. The list. Not the maths.
Oh, wait, that's actually an article about some new "greatest book ever" list. It's not about Tom Wolfe being "the hotness." Right. Sorry about that. Got hypnotized by the shirt.
The list, well, there's some new book out, and it's about some writers, who picked best books, then some other people worked mathematical voo-doo magic on it, and came up with a meta-list, and, well, you think it's wrong. The list. Not the maths.
Rumors of the death of the over-extended metaphor have been greatly exaggerated
I've been slacking off on my Erin O'Brien hype-boy duties. So when I was doing the daily Google Reader dance just now, and I saw Ed "The Red" Champion toss out a seemingly disposable comment about writers and honesty, and then a bit later I saw this post of Erin's, which ends with about as honest a statement as can exist on this level of reality; well, let's say that it was as if a thin layer of the universe had momentarily peeled back, revealing two dots embedded in the fabric of existence, one labeled "1", the other labeled "2". And here I sit, armed with a thick blue Laddie pencil, and the task of connecting them to reveal a hidden picture of awesome.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, January 15, 2007
The ad revenue alone will bankroll at least a thousand Mansquito sequels, and, if we're lucky, a second Lost Room series
So, speaking of Neal Stephenson, my Google alert finally brings something that isn't yet another article about how his novel Snow Crash inspired the online video-game universe Second Life:
Clooney producing? Stephenson adapting? That's not rain you hear: it's the sound of the entire executive staff of the Sci-Fi Channel collectively urinating themselves in shock and joy.
At Sci Fi, "Diamond Age," exec produced by [George] Clooney and Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Prods., is a six-hour mini in development that's based on Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer," which the author will adapt for the small screen. As the story goes, when a prominent member of society concedes that their futuristic civilization stifles creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter to serve as her guide through a surreal alternate world, but the device falls into the wrong hands.
Clooney producing? Stephenson adapting? That's not rain you hear: it's the sound of the entire executive staff of the Sci-Fi Channel collectively urinating themselves in shock and joy.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Two years of nonsense, and some book talk now and then, too
I tried to think of a good reason not to post this link. Really. In a marked departure from my typical "post first, regret later" technique, I've spent at least five minutes over the last two days debating this one. The best reasons I came up with were "Some people might not get it" and "It might make some people think I'm sort of weird," which, upon further reflection, were less about this particular link and more about this entire blog. Surprise, surprise: turns out not everybody thinks sitting up late at night typing on the Internet about books is "cool" or "hip" or "as fun as going to bars and waking up next to strangers." Pft, whatever--safe is the new dangerous, and that makes it way sexy, right? Right. Anyway, since hypothetical public opinion has never stopped me before, there was no logical reason for it to do so now, so I began to accept the task at hand.
Then I remembered that today, January 12, marks the second anniversary of the founding of this little self-indulgent exercise in time-wasting claptrap, and that cemented it, because honestly, is there any better way to celebrate the occasion than with Swedish Librarian Fashion photos? Suffice it to say that no, no there isn't, and that we here at TDAOC HQ emphatically condone this sort of behavior, and hope to see more of it in the future.
Also, rumor has it there's some fiction links, somewhere over there. Must be hidden somewhere on the sides of the page. Haven't found 'em yet.
I'll be back in a couple days with something else. Hell if I know what yet. Whatever it will be, it probably won't be as awesome as Swedish Librarian Fashion photos.
(Link via Bookninja.)
Then I remembered that today, January 12, marks the second anniversary of the founding of this little self-indulgent exercise in time-wasting claptrap, and that cemented it, because honestly, is there any better way to celebrate the occasion than with Swedish Librarian Fashion photos? Suffice it to say that no, no there isn't, and that we here at TDAOC HQ emphatically condone this sort of behavior, and hope to see more of it in the future.
Also, rumor has it there's some fiction links, somewhere over there. Must be hidden somewhere on the sides of the page. Haven't found 'em yet.
I'll be back in a couple days with something else. Hell if I know what yet. Whatever it will be, it probably won't be as awesome as Swedish Librarian Fashion photos.
(Link via Bookninja.)
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
The clock starts on my mark
Something is about to happen that has not happened in a very long time: I'm about to begin reading a book that is not part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle. Which is to say that after drinking far more coffee yesterday than was perhaps healthy, I finished that series, meaning 2006 can now officially end, and 2007 may begin. (Only a week late. Not too bad.)
I could probably talk about the Baroque cycle for days. Specifically, I could probably bitch about elements of it for days, and praise other elements of it for an additional number of days. I don't know whether the two numbers would equal each other, because I'm not going there. Bottom line is, I certainly liked the series more than I did the first time I tried to read it, when it was originally published, and I'm glad I gave it another shot. (Everything that follows is informal, incomplete, and unprofessional. You've been warned!)
My bitches about the books mostly deal with style. Broadly speaking, in this series, Stephenson takes the balls-to-the-wall descriptiveness of Cryptonomicon, and re-shapes it into a more studied, stately, paced language, often technical and sometimes dry, and largely heavy, all of which is appropriate considering the era and subject matter he describes (the late 17th and early 18th centuries, mostly focusing on England, with stops throughout Europe and treks across the globe), but not typically as much fun to read. He likes to describe details first and explain the whole later, which is fun when you're in on the joke from the start but can be wearying after too many mildly disorienting occasions. He winks at us often, and hard; nobody should wink that much. He's definitely not writing in a period style, but there are tics and flourishes in there that pay homage to the era. That's not a complaint--nor is it a complaint that there are occasional dazzling or unexpectedly energetic or humorous bits of writing. The complaint is that the text isn't consistently and completely dazzling, humorous, or energetic.
The author of The Greatest Pizza Delivery Sequence in the History of Literature (see: Snow Crash) writing less-energetic language is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. Which I'm glad I discovered this time through, because there's damn good stuff in these books. Jack's wanderings about the world; philosophic discussions between major historical figures and Stephenson's made-up characters; liberal descriptions of ships and things that happen on them; Newton being a huge prick and Leibniz being a rather nice chap, the sort you'd like to have coffee with yourself; Jimmy and Danny the Irish Samurai, who I could not help but picture getting spun-off into their own film series just so the guys who did Boondock Saints could play them on the big screen; the list would go on, if I were a better note taker. I've never been a post-it note user while reading books? But reading this series, I could see just why I should be. I margin-starred plenty of great passages through all three books. Yeah, they're in there. Somewhere.
It's the disconnect between style and substance that seems most troubling to me, when it comes to Stephenson. He's a sort of master of the completely unnecessary info-dump. You can't bitch about him going on and on about whatever he finds interesting because that's his thing--it would be like criticizing Hamlet for thinking too much, or Virginia Madsen for being hot. What bugs me is that it feels like Stephenson so frequently and lengthily mis-steps in presenting that information to the reader, in these books. It's also highly likely that a lot of what he describes in these books, I'm just not as interested in--mea culpa, for every case I haven't remembered to recognize specifically. But plenty of those times it's possible I could have been convinced, were the author trying harder to convince me, that these were fascinating details.
Here's my big praise. Stephenson, through these books, largely succeeded in accomplishing something that rarely if ever happened in any history or literature class I took during my scholastic career: bringing this particular historical era, for me, to life, as being something that happened, something that was important, and something which has ramifications and consequences that are both current and relevant today. I can't comprehend the amount of information Stephenson had to have consumed, processed, and learned well enough to manipulate it into these books. No small feat. Count me among those waiting, with great curiosity, to see what he does next.
I could probably talk about the Baroque cycle for days. Specifically, I could probably bitch about elements of it for days, and praise other elements of it for an additional number of days. I don't know whether the two numbers would equal each other, because I'm not going there. Bottom line is, I certainly liked the series more than I did the first time I tried to read it, when it was originally published, and I'm glad I gave it another shot. (Everything that follows is informal, incomplete, and unprofessional. You've been warned!)
My bitches about the books mostly deal with style. Broadly speaking, in this series, Stephenson takes the balls-to-the-wall descriptiveness of Cryptonomicon, and re-shapes it into a more studied, stately, paced language, often technical and sometimes dry, and largely heavy, all of which is appropriate considering the era and subject matter he describes (the late 17th and early 18th centuries, mostly focusing on England, with stops throughout Europe and treks across the globe), but not typically as much fun to read. He likes to describe details first and explain the whole later, which is fun when you're in on the joke from the start but can be wearying after too many mildly disorienting occasions. He winks at us often, and hard; nobody should wink that much. He's definitely not writing in a period style, but there are tics and flourishes in there that pay homage to the era. That's not a complaint--nor is it a complaint that there are occasional dazzling or unexpectedly energetic or humorous bits of writing. The complaint is that the text isn't consistently and completely dazzling, humorous, or energetic.
The author of The Greatest Pizza Delivery Sequence in the History of Literature (see: Snow Crash) writing less-energetic language is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. Which I'm glad I discovered this time through, because there's damn good stuff in these books. Jack's wanderings about the world; philosophic discussions between major historical figures and Stephenson's made-up characters; liberal descriptions of ships and things that happen on them; Newton being a huge prick and Leibniz being a rather nice chap, the sort you'd like to have coffee with yourself; Jimmy and Danny the Irish Samurai, who I could not help but picture getting spun-off into their own film series just so the guys who did Boondock Saints could play them on the big screen; the list would go on, if I were a better note taker. I've never been a post-it note user while reading books? But reading this series, I could see just why I should be. I margin-starred plenty of great passages through all three books. Yeah, they're in there. Somewhere.
It's the disconnect between style and substance that seems most troubling to me, when it comes to Stephenson. He's a sort of master of the completely unnecessary info-dump. You can't bitch about him going on and on about whatever he finds interesting because that's his thing--it would be like criticizing Hamlet for thinking too much, or Virginia Madsen for being hot. What bugs me is that it feels like Stephenson so frequently and lengthily mis-steps in presenting that information to the reader, in these books. It's also highly likely that a lot of what he describes in these books, I'm just not as interested in--mea culpa, for every case I haven't remembered to recognize specifically. But plenty of those times it's possible I could have been convinced, were the author trying harder to convince me, that these were fascinating details.
Here's my big praise. Stephenson, through these books, largely succeeded in accomplishing something that rarely if ever happened in any history or literature class I took during my scholastic career: bringing this particular historical era, for me, to life, as being something that happened, something that was important, and something which has ramifications and consequences that are both current and relevant today. I can't comprehend the amount of information Stephenson had to have consumed, processed, and learned well enough to manipulate it into these books. No small feat. Count me among those waiting, with great curiosity, to see what he does next.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
A look ahead
[Editor's note: an earlier, incomplete, inferior version of this post was leaked through authorial incompetence. The hopefully less sucky version appears below. Responsible parties have been sacked.]
Ladies and gentlemen, you, the People of the Internet, have spoken, and your multifarious voices have raised a most glorious collective cry, ringing in the New Year with a singular, overwhelming, and beautiful Truth, in your official nomination of me as Your Official Authority on Things I Know Nothing About. I shall serve faithfully but inexpertly in this role to the best of my inabilities.
In the meantime, while I'm setting up my office (and getting the number of Gaius Baltar's portrait artist), does anybody need to slay some vampires? Because, holy wiggins-makin' site-stats spike, Buffy.
But no, this is no time to dwell on that which is behind us--neither 2006, nor the young ladies sitting behind me in this coffee shop, who, were they to judge my character based solely on the things I've fact-checked via Google during the writing of this post, would probably find me morally and intellectually lacking. Not that I would blame them. If I saw someone who wasn't me googling both "Gaius Baltar" and "chick lit" within the same quarter hour, I'd probably politely ask them to leave so as to free up that bandwidth for people with more pressing things to waste time on.
Ahem. It's 2007 now, and that means there's lots of 2007-y things to look forward to. There's posts at The Millions and Bookdwarf and Conversational Reading and stories at the New York Daily News and the Guardian that suggest many upcoming titles that you might consider eagerly anticipating. If 2007 is already a little too Web 1.0 for you, you can take a look ahead at 2008 at The Millions.
Me, my plans for the year are sort of half-retro, half-futuristic. You can probably align me with Matthew Tiffany--I'll keep slugging grenades at the TBR pile in a futile attempt to make some holes in it, while looking forward to the stuff that's going to come out of nowhere to take over my mind and not let go. Yes: these goals are mutually exclusive. No: that's not going to stop me from pursuing them both.
Looking at the 2007 lists, a few names jump out:
As for more general plans:
Ladies and gentlemen, you, the People of the Internet, have spoken, and your multifarious voices have raised a most glorious collective cry, ringing in the New Year with a singular, overwhelming, and beautiful Truth, in your official nomination of me as Your Official Authority on Things I Know Nothing About. I shall serve faithfully but inexpertly in this role to the best of my inabilities.
In the meantime, while I'm setting up my office (and getting the number of Gaius Baltar's portrait artist), does anybody need to slay some vampires? Because, holy wiggins-makin' site-stats spike, Buffy.
But no, this is no time to dwell on that which is behind us--neither 2006, nor the young ladies sitting behind me in this coffee shop, who, were they to judge my character based solely on the things I've fact-checked via Google during the writing of this post, would probably find me morally and intellectually lacking. Not that I would blame them. If I saw someone who wasn't me googling both "Gaius Baltar" and "chick lit" within the same quarter hour, I'd probably politely ask them to leave so as to free up that bandwidth for people with more pressing things to waste time on.
Ahem. It's 2007 now, and that means there's lots of 2007-y things to look forward to. There's posts at The Millions and Bookdwarf and Conversational Reading and stories at the New York Daily News and the Guardian that suggest many upcoming titles that you might consider eagerly anticipating. If 2007 is already a little too Web 1.0 for you, you can take a look ahead at 2008 at The Millions.
Me, my plans for the year are sort of half-retro, half-futuristic. You can probably align me with Matthew Tiffany--I'll keep slugging grenades at the TBR pile in a futile attempt to make some holes in it, while looking forward to the stuff that's going to come out of nowhere to take over my mind and not let go. Yes: these goals are mutually exclusive. No: that's not going to stop me from pursuing them both.
Looking at the 2007 lists, a few names jump out:
- I can see myself dropping everything for Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me when that comes out in March. I've enjoyed most everything of his I've read. The Fortress of Solitude holds a special place in my heart. Lethem says the book should be "funny and sexy...a brave foray to retrieve irrelevance for American novel-writing." I look forward to seeing what he does with that.
- Then there's the William T. Vollmann book, Poor People, which I suspect will be the exact opposite of funny, sexy, and irrelevant. I'm ready to go either way on this one. A lengthy break from Vollmann's stuff would probably be healthy. But, the topic sounds interesting.
- There's a new(ly translated) Haruki Murakami book I'm curious about, After Dark. I've opted to ration out my Murakami reading rather than gorge on his stuff, since I gather that he treads a lot of the same ground across his books, and it can be easy to burn out if you read too many of his books too fast. (An experience I can relate to with my own reading of Stephen Dixon's stuff, though I like to think I've caught that in time to prevent long-term damage.) Murakami's new book might be fun to read, to compare notes on how it stacks for a relative newcomer with how it works for people who have read more of his books.
- AL Kennedy and Rupert Thompson are two writers who I learned about from Maud Newton back in the hazy, uncertain days of 2005. I read one book by each author, liked each book a lot, and then promptly forgot both authors existed, because I am morally and intellectually lacking. They both have new books coming out in 2007. I don't know whether I will read the new books when they are released, but I do plan on re-visiting their back catalogues, probably within the next six months.
As for more general plans:
- I look forward to finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Before July. Please, God: I know we haven't spoken in a while, but give me the strength.
- I've developed a low-level fascination with historical fiction. This list and these two lists seem like good places to start searching for additional titles. (Fair warning: that first list is aimed at young adult readers. Therefore, by merely pointing at it, I've caused many people to think better of me, and many other people to think worse of me. I hope the two groups balance each other out.)
- I nominated five authors for the 2006 Underrated Writers project. Now I need to read every other author on the list. Then I can start tackling the the 2005 list. I plan to complete both lists by Tuesday.
- I'd like more people to tell me I'm wrong. So that means trying to work a few more current, hot titles into my reading list, so as to facilitate more cross-blog conversation. Or I could take some initiative and form some discussion groups (like the Roundtable model that is currently being used to discuss Against the Day at Metaxucafe) to get some more talk going about books I find conversation-worthy. Or I could start writing reviews for the New York Times Book Review section.
- Two words: shorter novels. Not that I'm done reading long novels. But once I finish the Baroque cycle, in September or October, I'm going to give myself a pass on anything over 400 pages for a while. Hell, I'd love to make the next twenty or thirty books I read all be less than 250 pages. With my last two or three months being consumed by Pynchon and Stephenson and Ann-Marie MacDonald (for which I'm awarding myself an early win on the Chunkster Challenge), I'm ready for a long season of high variety. (Meaning Don Quixote is going to have to wait just a bit longer, I'm afraid. But, I'll probably make an exception for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, sometime this year.)
- Take the above general directives and filter them through my realization that even though I recognize that I don't read enough female authors, I still don't read enough female authors. A while back, sparked by a funny story that involved me accidentally going out on a date with a lesbian (no-really-I-swear-it-was-hilarious), I realized that 97 percent of the music I listened to was created by all-guy bands or bands fronted by guy singers. Some vigorous soul-searching and corrective action ensued, and I've been a much happier person ever since. The kind of person who can now smarmily and accusingly point out that female artists were horribly underrepresented on Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2006 list. (It's been a few days since I ran the count, but I think there is a single-digit number of albums by acts that feature a female singer, and of those, only one, maybe two, could be "classically" classified as albums by female singer-songwriters. Disgraceful! Smarm!) It's feeling like a good time to do the same sort of thing for my reading habits. That This Is Not Chick Lit collection, edited by Elizabeth Merrick, is probably as good place as any to start finding new-to-me authors.
Monday, January 01, 2007
2007 Reading List: Preliminary thoughts on the 257 books I plan on reading this year
...Just kidding. Happy New Year!
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up Extra: 75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006
"What I read this year" lists: they're great fun, but incomplete portraits of the blogger as a human being. Because for every great book we glide through, for every satisfying book we consume then forget, for every middling book we choke back like cough syrup, there are 37 other books we're thinking about reading, and 4376 other books we could be reading. And yes, these are precise figures. My research will be published in the upcoming post, "Howevermany Irrational Experiments Challenge Round-up: 75 Pieces of Incredibly Accurate Scientific Data I Heavily Fudged and/or Fabricated from Whole Cloth in 2006."
So when we in the writing-about-writing business publish our year-end lists of books we've read or the ones we've loved, we know, deep down, that we're giving you only half the story. Or, I should say, 1/4376th of the story. For we are defined not alone by what we are (a collection of read and/or admired books), but also by what we are not (a diverse collection of slimy little bastards we never got around to taming).
So then, in the interests of partial transparency (for total transparency would require a few more hours than remain in 2006), I offer, as a companion to my seven-part list of 75 books that I read in 2006 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), the following list of 75 books that I failed to read in 2006.
Note that this should not be considered an exhaustive list: there are, for example, many graphic novels I could have failed to read this year in addition to the one noted below. Nevermind all the female authors who I neglected to neglect getting around to, or the obscenely high number of books published in 2006 that I don't even realize I haven't yet realized existed. Plus I think there's one or two celebrity biographies I haven't mentioned haven't having read, too, either. But 2007 is coming up fast, and I have some big plans for all the upcoming books that I haven't mentioned that I have no plans yet for planning on.
Confused? Not confused enough:
So when we in the writing-about-writing business publish our year-end lists of books we've read or the ones we've loved, we know, deep down, that we're giving you only half the story. Or, I should say, 1/4376th of the story. For we are defined not alone by what we are (a collection of read and/or admired books), but also by what we are not (a diverse collection of slimy little bastards we never got around to taming).
So then, in the interests of partial transparency (for total transparency would require a few more hours than remain in 2006), I offer, as a companion to my seven-part list of 75 books that I read in 2006 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), the following list of 75 books that I failed to read in 2006.
Note that this should not be considered an exhaustive list: there are, for example, many graphic novels I could have failed to read this year in addition to the one noted below. Nevermind all the female authors who I neglected to neglect getting around to, or the obscenely high number of books published in 2006 that I don't even realize I haven't yet realized existed. Plus I think there's one or two celebrity biographies I haven't mentioned haven't having read, too, either. But 2007 is coming up fast, and I have some big plans for all the upcoming books that I haven't mentioned that I have no plans yet for planning on.
Confused? Not confused enough:
- Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
2006 was a banner year for failed promises to myself. I planned a Summer of Dostoevsky, in which I was going to read his last five big novels, while sharing many wild observations and acute insights during my reading. I read Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, and I said like two things about them, and I think neither of those things I said were that I liked The Idiot way more this time than I did my first time through it some eight years earlier, which is about as basic of a thing as I could have said, but didn't. Then I got distracted by every single other book on my TBR pile for the remainder of the year. Also, like Maureen, I think I cleaned my kitchen.
Demons, at least, did get moved from the TBR piles to the end table next to my reading chair, a couple months ago. That ought to count for something. Do you know how many Americans this year failed even at the simple task of moving a Dostoevsky book across their living rooms? Hint: nearly all of them. Kind of puts things in perspective, that. - Independence Day by Richard Ford
- The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
I was pretty hot for Richard Ford when I read The Sportswriter back in May. The clear prose and plodding observational style of the opening volume of the Frank Bascombe trilogy were just what I needed at that exact moment. I liked it enough that I did consider reading Independence Day so that I could jump on The Lay of the Land when it came out.
Then I woke up one day, looked at myself in the mirror, and wondered what the hell I was thinking. And then I sat down in front of my television and played about eight hours of Katamari Damacy. With spirits soaring, indeed.
For what it's worth, I've touched neither Ford's books nor the video game since. - Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Earlier this year, I decided to jump on the "reading is re-reading" boat. I went through the apartment and grabbed a bunch of those books that I'd really, really loved when I'd first read them, and I piled them up, forming a TBR-R pile adjacent to the main stacks.
I've Swiffered the pile, once or twice, since I formed it.
It's not that I don't believe in re-reading. I look forward to re-reading several books I've read this year, and seeing them in that way you can only see a book when you're reading it for a second time. The Exquisite by Laird Hunt will hold up well, I'm sure. Pynchon's books, yes. But I think there must be a certain mood you have to be in to spend time re-reading old stuff. A mood in which you can safely walk into a bookstore, look at every book on the shelves, and decide that there is nothing you haven't read yet that you really need to read just then.
It's a mood I was in for approximately five minutes this year, I guess. And while I hesitate to make uncertain predictions about the future, I have a hunch that at least three out of the four books above will be right where they are now in a year's time. Unless I move out of my apartment. Then they'll be in some other building. Maybe less dusty. - The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway
Speaking of books I've planned on re-reading ever since I first read them. I keep looking at this book, thinking maybe now is the time to re-read it? And then, every time, I think, no. No, I am not ready to be that depressed again. - A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn
I keep looking at this book, thinking maybe now is the time to read it? And then I keep thinking, no. No, I am not ready to be that depressed. Ever. - The Fall by Albert Camus
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
When I decided I was going to re-read a bunch of books this year, I also decided I wanted to focus on books with "the" in the title.
Well, okay, that, and Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint left me craving more existential French stuff. So I piled up the Camus for Camus Re-Read Fest 06: The Oui Oui Non Non Bon-Bon Edition.
And then again, with the Swiffer, and the dusting. And the sneezing, now and then. I do that. Sneeze, I mean. - Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
- Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
- Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Earlier this year, in a madness spasm, I thought that maybe I would read all of Pynchon's novels before Against the Day was released, so then I could read it while everybody else was reading it, and then I could play along at home with the Internet's treasure trove of Pynchon scholars.
Well, when I get a time machine? I'm going back in time, and I'm going to find that version of me? And I'm going to laugh at me. And I'm going to point at myself, while I'm laughing at me.
Then I'm going to make like a tree and get the hell out of there. - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
I own this? What the hell? I don't remember buying this. - The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Since the release of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro has become one of my favorite writers. I've read that book twice and I've read When We Were Orphans and I've read The Remains of the Day and I've loved them each with all my heart. Never Let Me Go remains my favorite. I'm really looking forward to reading Ishiguro's next book, when he decides to publish a new one, in, like, 2017.
And yet I still haven't gathered up the courage to take another stab at The Unconsoled, the book I read in high school, and hated, hated, with black inky wet passion. I did take it off the shelf for a while, a couple months ago, and I had it in my laptop bag for a couple weeks, and then it went back onto the shelf, where it's propping up a stack of three Umberto Eco novels (who, himself, ought to be on this list, because, yeah, I didn't read any of his books this year, though I know I really should).
It's not that I don't want to try The Unconsoled again. I do. I have to believe I'll like it better than I did in high school. But what if I don't? What if it actually does still, to me, suck? Would that mean I've achieved a net zero intellectual and aesthetic growth since high school?
What I'm saying is that like an attractive smart girl, this book draws my eye while making me exceedingly nervous, and I'm still trying to come up with a good approach, a pick-up line, a conquistadoring technique that won't result in immediate pain and/or embarrassment for either of us. - Libra by Don DeLillo
- Mao II by Don DeLillo
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
Motherfucking Don DeLillo. Right? Am I right? You know what I mean.
See: I have this theory that outside of White Noise, nobody actually reads Don DeLillo's books. People just talk about them at dinner parties so they can attract mates, but if you gave them a pop quiz on the contents of the books, they'd all fail miserably.
Well, except for Jennifer Egan, who I believe when she says she read and liked Underworld, but that's because her brain is naturally sexier than those of most of the rest of the human race. For her, Underworld did move to my end table, so that if on the off-hand chance she drops by my apartment for a visit, I can pick the book up real quick and act like I was about to start reading it. Then she'll marry me.
Okay, so, fine. I put Don DeLillo on this list solely to get to the Jennifer Egan joke. My editors informed me that I haven't met my "Darby has a huge literary crush on Jennifer Egan's brain" jokes yet this year. And by jokes I mean, well, I sort of want to ask her to prom. The Literary Prom. The one where instead of a band, it's just Don DeLillo reading excerpts of White Noise, while Jennifer Egan and I dance under the moonlight, and William T. Vollmann spikes the punch. With crack.
What? Yeah, like your fantasies are less weird. - White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
- Clara by Janice Galloway
- Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr.
- Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner
Around about when I decided I was going to re-read books, I also decided I was going to take all these books I'd started but abandoned and I was going to read them but for real. These five books are all very lovely books, I'm sure, from what I remember of them--Clara, especially, I remember finding really entrancing (and infinitely less brutal, but I guess also equally less addicting, than The Trick is to Keep Breathing). They all deserved better from me.
This stack is looking like a great way to start 2007. An early spring cleaning of sorts. We'll see what happens in reality, though, where I'll probably wind up reading some crap or something stupid. - Oh The Glory of it All by Sean Wilsey
I feel bad about this one, because I was going through an "Unnnghgg" period a while back, during which I didn't know what I wanted to read, and a friend recommended this one, and I got it out from the library, and then I never got around to reading it, and now I have a really huge fine on it, and then there's always the chance that I'm going to run into this friend, and I'm going to feel awful for not having read the book yet, even though said friend probably doesn't even remember recommending it to me, so I don't know what I feel so bad for. - You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann
- The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann
- Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann
I read four of this dude's books this year and he's all like "Whatever, bitch, I got four books coming out next year, I wrote them while I was sitting on the toilet the other day, what have you done with your life, little boy?"
Jerk.
You Bright and Risen Angels was the first book of his I ever bought, and at the rate things are going it will be the last one I read. The Royal Family, Jeff suggested that one, and I know it's the next Vollmann book I want to read, but I've yet to see it on a shelf in front of me in a bookstore, so I haven't bought it yet. And Fathers and Crows, damn, have you ever seen this thing? Or tried to pick it up with one hand? That book's scary huge. Did I mention I'm reading The Baroque Cycle right now? Yeah, so you know when I'm scared of the size of a book? It's a really big book. You can try to tell me half of it is footnotes and an index, but then I'll already be giving you the finger, because when I get that time machine I mentioned before, I'm going to make sure I tell myself you were going to tell me that.
- The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
It's the first book he published and the only book of his I haven't read. And really I feel no rush to get to it, because I know it won't be as awesome as The Corrections. Still, I feel obliged to complete the set, and guilty for not having done so yet.
Oh yeah, the Literary Prom I mentioned before? As a little joke? The spirit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I are totally dunking Franzen's head in the crack-spiked punch. It's going to be hilarious. And awesome. Buy your tickets early. - The Accidental by Ali Smith
- Talk Talk by TC Boyle
- The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
These are all books that were published in 2006 that somebody somewhere had in their year-end list of favorites. In the act of compiling this list of books I can form no reasonable opinions about, I misplaced the location and identity of the list from which I took these three books. So, to whomever listed these three books? I'm sorry. I don't listen to you enough. I don't even know who you are.
About these three books, I can say that The Accidental is one of those many many titles I heard a lot about but which I failed to pay any attention to so I know absolutely nothing about it; Talk Talk had that ridiculously hideous cover of the mouth and the teeth that convinced me I'd rather stab myself in the face than make that book my first Boyle book; and The Echo Maker won the National Book Award, which means if history repeats itself, I'll read it the way I read Europe Central by William T. Vollmann and then I'll feel compelled to start working my way through the man's entire back catalogue, and you know what? I don't have time for that. I've got enough back catalogues to slash and burn through. So screw you, Richard Powers, for writing what is probably an amazing, awesome book that I'm not going to read for at least another two or three weeks. - Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy
I read All the Pretty Horses this year and decided I hated Cormac Mccarthy for it. Then I read The Road and decided I loved Cormac Mccarthy for it. So I think I'm going to ignore Blood Meridian for a while and decide I really don't know what to think about Cormac Mccarthy for it. - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
Will somebody put this dude on pause? So I can make at least a moderate dent in his back catalogue? Because there's like 150 other books of his I could list here but chose not to? Okay? Please? Thanks! - Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
- The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
- The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
The New York Times called these three books, along with The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, the Five Best Books of Fiction Published in 2006.
I call Pessl's book (the one out of these five that I have read) the What the Fuck are You Smoking, New York Times? Book of the Year. I mean, it wasn't really bad, but, lord, it sure wasn't that great. Plus, didn't that Tanenhaus guy make fun of litbloggers again recently? I mean, I don't even care what that guy has to say about anything, because he's a New Yorker and I'm a human being, but I still wound up this year thinking he's a douchebag. It's like, good job, asshole, you keep making what should be your primary audience hate you. Way to be!
What was I saying? Oh, yeah, the Literary Prom. Marisha Pessl? Huge, expensive dress. When Kaavya Viswanathan shows up in the exact same dress? Seriously huge histrionics. Literary Prom is going to be so much better than the real prom I never went to. - The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
I think this is one of those books I really, really, really, really do need to read, because it might become one of those books I love and cherish for all time. But I don't know why I think that. Because I don't actually know anything about the book. It's tied for second place on the Metacritic year-end list, so I know at least a few other people loved it. Am I so out of touch? What am I wasting my time on Dostoevsky for? (Or, uh, wasting my time on not wasting my time on Dostoevsky.) How can I have read 75 books this year and not know anything about one that I suspect might be meant for me? How can I be such a screw-up?
Don't answer that last question. - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Sigh.
One of those things I said I was going to do this year was read all these really huge books that are way easier to not read because they're so huge. And in my defense, I did get through some doorstops. For getting Lord of the Rings off the TBR pile alone, I feel I deserve the 2006 Award for Best Litblogger of the Year Named Darby. But, somehow, I didn't get to the two long-ass novels that originally sparked my '06 interest in super-long novels.
It's been too long since I've read any Dickens, long enough that, though I know I love me some Dickens, I've lost all track of which of his books I've read and which I haven't (was it Dombey and Son I made it through? or David Copperfield? or was it the one with the poor kid in it?) other than Bleak House, which, I knew for a fact, I'd once started, and never finished. Yeah, not this year, either.
And as for Don Quixote, I bought it earlier this year, that nice paperback copy with the red cover and the translation by Edith Grossman, because I stumbled into the 400 Windmills blog which I found rather inspiring, and anyway, if you're going to explicitly set out to read excessively long novels, you might as well read the mother of them all, right? Not so much I guess.
These two, at least I didn't have to Swiffer them, because they were buried under my Dostoevskys. Score! - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
George is right about this--it's the Stephenson book to read and re-read. So, uh, why haven't I re-read it yet? I could re-read it eight times in the time it's taking me to get through the Baroque cycle. Not that I would. But I could. - A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus
- Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
- The Zero by Jess Walter
Hey! Check it out! It's three-fifths of the 2006 National Book Award shortlist! Nevermind The Echo Maker, which won, which I haven't read yet, either. Seriously, just...fuck. I suck at this.
One out of five ain't too bad, right? My best year out of the 2000s is 2001; I've read three of those titles. I've done two of last year's books. I'm going to devote one of these years, maybe '08 or '09, to reading all of the NBA shortlist titles from the 2000s, just so I can feel like I have something akin to contemporary lit cred. - Far too many literary journals to mention
When I conceived of this list, I thought, ha ha, this will be funny, a lark, an amusing way to end the year, a way to make up for all the dead air here of late, and then I saw myself typing out this entry, and I got real sad, because, it's true: there are too many literary journals out there that I really ought to subscribe to and read regularly. There's a lot of "reading categories" I need to give higher priority to in my reading queue, and this one probably needs the biggest boost.
Shoot. Now I'm depressed. - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I put this one here to cheer myself up. Because, you know what? Fuck Wuthering Heights. That book blows.
Yes! Now I'm having fun again. - Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahaaaa.
For real, though, I moved it to the end table, thinking I'd maybe brush up on my theory, now and then. Read an essay or two, here or there. Smarten myself back up some. This stuff fascinated me six, seven years ago, and maybe it'll fascinate me again in six or seven more, but right now? Thpft. - Stories by Anton Chekov
- Sleep by Stephen Dixon
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
- The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Partial credit. I've been trying to read more short stories. So I collected some of the random collections I've bought over the years, and lined them up on my end table (yes, the one with Underworld and Demons and Literary Theory on it, the table where books go to die), and read a story or two from each book before bumping it to the back of the queue, and I'd do a couple stories from a couple books this way between novels. This worked great for a while. Then I stopped doing it. It didn't work so well when I didn't do it.
But the books are still there, for when I get back around to being in that mode. I consider it a successful proof of concept. Plus, and I think most importantly, this system did get me to start reading Chekov, which, come on: how did I get this far in life without reading any Chekov? Chekov rules. - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
2006 marks the fourth consecutive year in which I've vocally expressed interest in re-reading Infinite Jest and then never did anything about it. In 2007, the TDAOC Marketing Department plans on releasing a five dollar Fifth Anniversary paperback edition of my failure to re-read Infinite Jest, with a paean-like introduction penned by Your Pal The Rake. No word yet on whether Dave Eggers will offer Rake 49 bucks to eat his ass. - Snow by Orhan Pamuk
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Dude won the Nobel, you know. Least I could have done to thank the guy for being awesome was re-read Snow, right? It's hard to blame myself for not reading The Black Book since I just bought it last night. But really, what am I doing typing up lists on the Internet when I could be reading Pamuk's books? - The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
Yeah, maybe I gifted it to myself--but you and I know the truth: I'm a dirty damned lying literary whore. - The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
My friend Erin, who, like me, was cautious about this book because of "the Foer thing," read it, and liked it, and said that I could safely set "the Foer thing" aside, and read it, because it's a good book. I haven't read it yet though, and now I feel guilty whenever Erin IMs me.
There's a good reason why personal recommendations usually get bumped to the top of my reading queue: personal cowardice. - Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Speaking of "the Foer thing," I just know that if I actually read one of his books, I'll spend the duration of it wanting to punch him in the face, because people my age shouldn't be fabulously successful while I'm still nothing but an Internet jerk. Needless to say, Foer's so not invited to the Literary Prom.
Damn, though. I can't wait until I get my time machine, and I can come back in time, and tell myself how far Foer fell, during my rise to fame. Mmmm: taste that champagne, Foer? It's a special brand I call victory over you, screwface! - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
- The Secret River by Kate Grenville
- Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland
- In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
- Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn
- The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Hey! Check it out! It's the entire 2006 Man Booker shortlist!
Yeah, I'm awful. Great Britain, I'm so sending you some more love in 2007. I promise. Unless I find out I'm lying. - Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Here's a token graphic novel I didn't read. I might still read it. It, along with Black Hole, was one of those recent titles that snagged my interest toward the genre.
I hear there's a dirty part or two in there. - Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer
Gwenda recommended this one, and I got super excited, because it sounded like exactly what I wanted to read at that exact moment, and so I ordered it from the library, and then they put it on hold for me, and then when I got there, it was already gone, and now my library card is all fined out until I get some of these other books I haven't read back to the library. I think I'm going to just buy it when it comes out in paperback. It's safer that way.
It does sound great, anyway. - Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
- Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
What the? I read Cloud Atlas last year and I loved it. Loved. It. And I haven't read the rest of his books yet? I've got the first two on the shelf and then I had the last one from the library and I read the opening paragraph, but I think the sun was in my eyes that day or something, because the next thing I knew, I wasn't reading it anymore. Then I was a bird. Yeah, it was strange. - The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Well hell. Now that I've read Gravity's Rainbow for real, there's this hole in my heart, a hole that can only be filled by the knowledge that there's some other brick-thick modernist masterpiece I can actively despise without having ever read it. Oh! If only some great white male would...aw, hell, my heart's not in it. I'm sure The Recognitions is a lovely book to hate and then read and then love, but I'm going to go back to thinking about punching Foer in the face. At least his books are short, so I can not read them in far less time.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up #7
So, yeah: I'm calling it. Year's over, folks. Oh, sure, you can keep reading and reading and reading for the approximately 48 hours of 2006 that remain? But in the grand scheme of things, they won't much matter. So here's the end of my list. Now you can buy me 75 beers in celebration of my having read 75 books.
I suppose I might do some list analysis at some time. Though I suspect the results will be grim; I'm sure my male-to-female authors ratio makes me look like a bad person, for example. And I haven't read enough graphic novels, which makes me an anti-hipster ass. And I've read neither enough current books nor enough back catalogue books. And, and, and. That's a list for another day.
Meanwhiles:
I suppose I might do some list analysis at some time. Though I suspect the results will be grim; I'm sure my male-to-female authors ratio makes me look like a bad person, for example. And I haven't read enough graphic novels, which makes me an anti-hipster ass. And I've read neither enough current books nor enough back catalogue books. And, and, and. That's a list for another day.
Meanwhiles:
- Ghost World, Daniel Clowes.
- Black Hole, Charles Burns.
I tumbled out of Gravity's Rainbow in November and immediately fell into a reading rut that grips me still today. I tried to ease my way out of Pynchon's book with a couple graphic novels--I'm not a graphic novel guy, but the timing seemed right to take a look at a few. In the sense that really, at that point, I just wanted an author to show me exactly what he had in his mind. And these were good, these were good for that purpose, and that's great. Great and all but, yeah. I'm still not a graphic novel guy.
I know that saying that might make me look like some kind of jerk when seen through the filter of certain strains of popular opinion, so let me be clear: I know that graphic novels have "come of age" and that adults can read them and they can be targeted at adults and that they can be treated as serious literature. I know all that. I also know that there's a rising choir of voices singing the praises of the graphic novel and the fact that they are an essential part of a complete literary diet. I get it. I've seen the light. I acknowledge it.
Also, I appreciate the skill and talent that goes into the production of graphic arts, illustrated novels, the lot of it. I see that the artist's "style" constitutes his or her "voice" in this literary realm. I also find the techniques and technology of the contemporary craft quite fascinating. (Penny Arcade ran a four-page comic over the last week that featured commentary by the artist, which I've been avidly reading; neat stuff.)
So now when I restate my belief that I'm simply not a graphic novel guy, you (hypothetical holder of above-referenced "popular opinion") will need to find new ground to refute me from. I suppose what this "you" would be saying would be made more clear were I to actually go dig up some concrete examples of said popular opinion so that my own perspective could be aligned precisely against this weird strain of elitist tomfoolerly I've seen once or twice now? But it's the end of the year and I'm feeling lazy. Real lazy. - End of I., Stephen Dixon.
I read a lot of his stuff this year. Five books, to be exact. I'll be attempting to take a break from him in 2007. It'll be good for our relationship, I think. - The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Yeah, so, still caught in a Pynchon rut, what do I go off and do? I grab a fat book off the shelf that I think is going to be a total fluff epic about childhood and children and childish things, something real light I can wrap myself up in for a while--only to find out it's a book that centers, in large part, on the manufacture of the V-2 Rocket in Nazi Germany during World War II.
Right.
I liked it well enough. Needed to be about two to four hundred pages shorter, but really I didn't care that much, at the time. - Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
One of the weirdest books I've read that I feel comfortable saying deserves the status of "modern classic." Is it fair to say Dunn single-handedly invented and perfected Chuck Palahniuk? Like, his entire "modern-day messiah" genre? Am I right or am I right? - Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
- The Confusion, Neal Stephenson
- The System of the World, Neal Stephenson
I'm gifting myself this series. I finished Quicksilver for the 75, and I'm going to keep reading until my eyes fall out of my head, but it would be physically impossible for me to finish the series before the year's over. But listing them next year would just look silly, so I'm putting them here, regardless of whether I do finish them or not, next year.
Whatever. I'm 300 pages into The Confusion as of this writing. When I picked it up last night I slogged through 30-50 pages of crap; I was at a serious nadir and was ready to get up and walk away for good. Then Stephenson whipped out 150 pages of high-seas piracy and ship chases, plots and counterplots surrounding a secret stash of gold, a beheading (and a head delivery), sword fights, and various other actions and activities. I couldn't put the book down. Gripping stuff! I'm scared to pick it back up because I think he's about to tank all the momentum he just built up.
McQ is right, for sure--these books aren't as cool as Cryptonomicon was. (I'd substitute Snow Crash for The Diamond Age, myself, since I think I read the latter once, forgot it completely, read it again to see what I'd forgotten, then forgot it all all over again, and, unless someone makes a good case for it, I will probably not be going back to it a third time, because if I don't even know what I don't know, what don't I know? Nothing.) But when Stephenson is on, yeah, there's this weird thing that happens where you can see how perfect and brilliant the Cycle would be, if he would stop doing the uncool stuff, and do nothing but the cool stuff that he does so well between all the uncool stuff.
There's a real concept versus execution gap here, I think. Sure, a super hot girl single-handedly creating the modern system of commerce is fascinating, in concept. But something lacks in Stephenson's execution.
In general he seems to do much better when he has actual things and actions to describe. There's a lengthy description in The Confusion of one man entering a room where another man is standing, that suggests all the ways they react and prepare for each other before they say a word, on the off-hand chance that one of them will attempt to begin a fight with the other. It's totally gratuitous and needlessly technical. It's silly, is what I'm saying. But compellingly so. And, then, like, back in Quicksilver, reading about all the foolish experiments conducted by the Royal Society is great fun, though it moves nothing along; there's something concrete and happening in front of the reader, and it makes it feel like things are moving along, like there's something to be gotten from the text. But then he'll go off and talk about genealogy or scene or who did what to who (someplace other than where the current action is) and it's like, agh, shut up, what am I bothering for? I hate you, book, and I want you to die.
Then a bit later you've got a samurai running around Cairo separating heads and limbs from their owners' bodies, and it's like, yes, YES! This is AWESOME! And I'm pumping my fist in the air over the book. A samurai in Cairo! This rules!
What I'm saying is it's very back and forth and up and down right now. It's sort of a metaphor for the year, or something.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)