May

28

Negativity

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I am 23,000 words through my attempt at a novel, so I’m feeling good about myself and have some leftover chattiness so I thought I’d update.

I have a tendency to pick up books from the New Books shelf in the library even if I wasn’t particularly interested in them. Mostly just to have something. That’s why I had The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff and Beginner’s Greek by James Collins. I finished Monsters last week and was annoyed for all the reasons I expected to be.  Does the world really need another novel with an unexpected pregnancy and digging through family secrets and a question of paternity?  Because I feel like I’ve read that book a million times.  Groff tries too hard, as her reviews noted, but I think they were a bit too kind to her.  Yes, she’s obviously talented, but with cliches stacked to the ceiling, I’m less inclined to be forgiving.

I’m in the middle of Greek right now and it’s a trudge.  It’s quick enough reading, but it’s got plenty going against it.  I hate love-at-first-sight books.  I hate books where the two main characters are picked out by all those around them as worthy of love and interest.  In general, this is not how the world works.  You don’t just have it and people don’t just know.  I also have trouble with books where adults carry torches for years.  I admit that many of my problems with the book are rooted in what I find to be unrealistic and stupid romance.  It’s weird, now that I’m in the most romantic stage of my life, I find romance uninspiring.  It always rings false.  There’s never that underlying note of truth in it.  All of Greek lacks that underlying sincerity.  Not a single character in it has felt real to me.  I suppose I’m meant to think that this is how things go in the upper crust, but I’ve read better and more biting satire, too.  And everything is falling so neatly into place now that I’m on the downhill slope that it all just feels even more manufactured.

I suppose the lesson should be not to read books I know I won’t like.  And yet I do it anyway.  I claim to be keeping track of the market.  And I am.  But still.

I will have access to all my movies again very soon, in the mean time I’ve finished with my most recent set of Sopranos episodes only to find out that there’s another part of Season 6 that I didn’t have.  I was so relieved to be almost done.  Season 6 started good, but went downhill and seems to be continuing in that direction.  All in all, I’m very disenchanted with the show.  Could they show more bare breasts if they tried?  It’s bordering on misogynistic.  I understand that many scenes take place in a strip club, but do we have to get a full on shot of a stripper in each scene?  Plus, they have little psychological progress to show for Tony, which means the show kind of rambles around.  Yes, I get it, everyone in the mob is unhappy.  But what I don’t understand is how so many of them live so long at the rate they go around killing each other.  And the gay character angle, which just ended, was very dated and overlong.

I sound like I’m complaining a lot, don’t I?  My current audio book is disappointing as well.  Not so much the book, but the reader who is frustrating me.  I may ditch it when I start my long drives again next week.  I have two worthy replacements.

I am looking forward to seeing more movies and getting out of the book phase.  Don’t even get me started on how bad Indiana Jones was.  My rant went on for some time.  Eric was mostly a good sport about it, though.  I didn’t even mind going to it because I wanted to be able to watch something.

Happily, I should have a steady supply of good books coming in since I sent in another round of requests at the library.  Though it’s very possible I’ll be completely not in the mood for books by the time they come in.

May

23

Lists

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This list makes me frustrated. Sure, it’s no real authority.  But I generally think of myself as well-read, so when I see a list of 1,001 books that someone views as important, whether or not I give that person much credit, I usually expect to do well.  But this time I came through with 145 total that I found.  I’m not sure about that number (it’s late, my eyes hurt, and when I just checked the site to add the link, I immediately found one I hadn’t counted) but it’s probably not much higher.

I already have my justifications.  It’s very heavy on the 20th century stuff.  And I suck at that.  When the Modern Library put out the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century, I was sorely lacking.  (Currently, I’m still lacking, despite having the list in my hands for years, I’m still at only 35.  Shame on me.)  And there’s plenty on there I’ve never heard of, so therefore couldn’t have known to read.  The places I’m lacking most are in the 70’s and 80’s, too recent to be heralded as classics, but too old for me to have been around and keeping tabs when they came out.  It’s a good reference for the future, I guess.  But also a reminder, as ever, that I have tons more I want to read.  On both lists, for example, I noticed Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford.  Why haven’t I read it?  The Good Soldier, by Ford, is one of the best books I read in college, when I did some of my prime reading.  I loved it and have always wanted to read more Ford.  I have no excuse for not doing so.

Meanwhile, I’m going to counter these lists with a list of my own, all books I’ve read so I can’t feel bad about it.  I’ve been thinking lately about what my Desert Island books would be.  Not just my official favorites, those include things like Lolita, which I adore, but which I don’t just sit down in a chair with when I want something cozy.  A Desert Island book should be a book you don’t mind having to read over and over again, not one you get bored of.

Here’s my list thus far:

  1. The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  A book I happened upon because I liked its cover.  This is not the kind of thing I do.  Nevertheless I love it and have read it more times in adulthood than any other book.  (I must say adulthood, because as a kid I read Where the Red Fern Grows about 50 times.)  Every time I read it, even though I know every piece of it, I manage to get completely lost in it.  I can’t explain it.  I don’t know what about it draws me in, but it feels like a whole and complete world and I adore it.
  2. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  I remember reading this for the first time at Sundance while other people watched movies and didn’t feel at all left out.  I love this book and I love waiting a couple years between readings so that I forget bits of it and get continually surprised.  Scarlett is such a great character, so interesting and scheming but still worthy of affection.  I would name my kid Scarlett if I didn’t have a last name full of S’s.  It would be too much of a temptation to fate to give her a lisp.
  3. The Magus by John Fowles.  A recent addition, since it just got its first re-reading.  A perfect Desert Island book because it’s long and twisty and crazy.  An acid-trip of a book if there ever was one.  I am going to let this one sit a bit, too, but I know I will re-read it.  I love movies about cons, with shifting allegiances and secret schemes, and this book is just like that.  Except in Greece and with weird kinky stuff.
  4. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.  A comfort book completely.  It’s sappy, yes, but it is the book equivalent of curling up in a big soft chair.  Irving is prone to big overblown stories with big overblown characters and this book is no exception.  But there seems to be more of a nugget of sincerity at the heart of it all with this one.
  5. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.  I may be the only person who’d pick this over Kavalier & Clay, but I do.  I have a tendency to take the intimate over the epic.  And there’s certainly enough of a crazy journey in Wonder Boys.  It’s also weirdly one of those books where the movie takes over your reading, just like I see Daniel Radcliffe when I read Harry Potter, I see Michael Douglas when I read Wonder Boys.  Fortunately, the movie was very well-cast.
  6. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.  The only book on the list I started reading as a kid that I still read.  I think my first time through must have been when I was around 13 or 14.  It spoke to me strongly then, since many of the scenes follow the main character as a young boy.  When I read it again as an adult, I was amazed at how the adult scenes carried much more clarity.  I haven’t gone through it recently, though this is mostly because my reading list is so long these days, I doubt it’s lost its power.

Honorable Mentions, or books that I haven’t re-read yet but hope to eventually add to the list:

Of course, the funny thing about having this re-read list is that it’s just this kind of thing that keeps me from making serious headway on other lists.  Perhaps that’s why there hasn’t been much re-reading of late while I frantically try and make progress.  Then again, I enjoy reading these books so much more than most anything new that I suppose it’s worth it to have missed some of the more prestigious ones for the ones I love most particularly.

May

19

A Deluge

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I have been reading like a crazy person lately.  I haven’t realized it at all until I updated my book list again and realized that I’d read the last several entries within a week or two.  My book list has also surpassed my movie list by 10 or so, which is impressive since it was behind for a while there a month or so ago.  It’s hard to get more books than movies, the movies are such a short time investment.  And I’ve gone to the movies a lot more recently.

As for my books, I’ve been very pleased with them.  I am still working on Ada and will be for a while to come.  I finished The Corrections, which got a little better but was still not a great experience.  Eric listened to a little bit of it and his description of Franzen’s writing was perfect: ostentatious.  I enjoyed Boy Toy, a YA novel with a touchy subject (it seems like all YA fiction has to be edgy these days, what happened to the stuff like A Girl of the Limberlost?).  It was about a teenage boy recovering after he was seduced by his teacher.  It had the potential to be annoying and treacly, but somehow he really sold it.  It was pretty racy, though, which is another thing I’m noticing is in vogue among YA these days.  I need to put Barry Lyga’s first book on my booklist.

I read Susan Choi’s new book, A Person of Interest, and liked it well enough.  Still, I loved loved American Woman, the only book that has anything to do with 60’s radicalism that I like even the slightest bit.  There are way too many books about it and most of them are dismal.

Several mysteries, as usual.  The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz was fun, quick, full of sarcasm.  But my favorite of recent weeks is In the Woods by Tana French, which I liked so much I’m going to do a podcast on it.  I’ve been wanting to do another, but waiting till I found the right book.  Since I’m a mystery nut as it is, it’s a natural choice.  So you’ll probably be hearing more soon.

Two other books of note recently (I’ve been uncommonly lucky the past couple weeks, many books worth mentioning).  Starting Out in the Evening, which I saw the movie of earlier this year.  The book was very good, though it also left me impressed with the film, which fully imparted the characters to me so well that nothing in the book gave me much of an additional level to consider.  Still nice, though.  And The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which, like many books, I can’t remember adding to my list of things to read.  I must have seen a review or something.  I’d never heard of James Morrow before, though apparently he’s been around for a while, and I’m a little surprise since I like satire and there’s so little of it.  The book has an awful cover, but is one of the craziest and funniest ones I’ve read in a while.  It lost much of its comedic steam after the first third, but it did keep you constantly turned on your head.  The basic premise of the book, which requires a philosophy student to give a girl her “moral compass,” involved many role-playing activities involving various philosophical dilemmas, which were fun.  And many references to Epicureanism and Stoicism, etc.  Kind of like Candide on some kind of illegal substance.

Since I’ve been reading so much, I haven’t been seeing much.  I watched an episode of The Sopranos today (I’m almost done!) after a while without it and I haven’t missed it.  I mostly want to get through it all.  But if I have to sit through another episode that’s half dream sequences, I think I may quit.  I hate the dream sequences.

Tonight we may be going out on the town.  I have somehow convinced Eric that he should see Redbelt with me.  Granted, it’s a little easier to get him to see something when it involves mixed martial arts, but still.  I’m always up for Mamet, even though he’s never really perfect.  But I’ve heard enough good to get me in the theater for this one.  Very excited.

May

6

Props to Me

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I actually followed through.  I have started reading Ada, and have made enough headway that I am confident I’ll see it through.  It’s very strange to read Nabokov again after such a long hiatus.  He has so little of what I generally look for in modern fiction.  He cares much more for specific little things than the bigger bits of fiction.  For example, the main plot in Ada involves an incestuous relationship.  And I read an interview where Nabokov said this wasn’t because of any particular interest in sex, but in the potential words he could use and their relationship.  Sibling, sable, bloom, etc.  This is typical, I suppose, but still something to get used to.  I’m not the type to really fall into these wordplays.

I also haven’t read most of Nabokov’s fiction.  So my view is definitely slanted.  But there are things I definitely like.  I am often annoyed at the portrayal of women by men in fiction, particularly women they love or lust after.  Everything is beautiful to them.  But a beloved girl in Nabokov, well, she doesn’t have cute bad habits but actual bad ones.  And not one that has to do with a plot at all.  Nabokov’s women and girls read like actual women and girls, which is one thing I’m always picky about.  Still, I know a lot of women have a hard time with Nabokov.  It’s hard not to with Lolita.  But now that I’m reading Ada, which also involves a sexual relationship with a young girl (the boy is quite young as well) I think there’s something he addresses through these relationships.  Basically, that innocence is not the same as sexual innocence or experience.  That there is something separate and different between the two.  And in the playful child scenes in Ada, that certainly seems to be true.  Lolita, of course, was about a girl who was never innocent, even before she was involved in anything sexual.  (Or at least, that’s what Humbert thinks.)

Nabokov definitely seems to court trouble with his subject matter.  Then again, I don’t know that this is really his goal.  While it’s still early in the novel, I have figured out that the narrative structure is quite crazy.  There seem to be two authors who occasionally trade off and will leave notes for one another through the text.  And it’s in a parallel universe without electricity and where there’s this weird US-Russia conglomerate.

More to follow when I actually get through it.  But I just had to pat myself on the back.  It wasn’t easy to start.  (The first few chapters, I have now found from a quick internet search, are deliberately difficult.  Made me feel better because I was very lost.)