Oh, I am behind. Since my last post I have more than doubled the number of books read. I have had many posts I’ve wanted to write and have been too busy to get to them.
So let’s just get those unwritten post ideas out of the way to hit some of the highlights. (Most of these will be covered in more depth in my Best of the Year So Far list that I’ll be making next month.)
–The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker is exactly the kind of book I would normally skip. Plot-less, meandering, and about a poet. Instead it was an absolute joy and I was very sad when it was over. It was also highly quotable, I wanted to take so many of the sentences and cross-stitch them as samplers.
–I had a post in my head about how to write about big “issues” well vs. badly. So Much for That by Lionel Shriver is the “well.” The love-or-hate A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore is the “badly.” (Which tells you which camp I fell into.) There were a few times in Shriver’s big bold novel on health care that I felt a bit alienated because it was just so on-the-nose, but I think she showed exactly how real people’s lives intersect with such massive problems. I realized I’m just naturally uncomfortable with current events and such in literature, probably since most of what I grew up reading was old. Shriver got me over it. Why haven’t more people been talking about this book?
–A Room with a View is perhaps one of the few film adaptations that is possibly a bit better than the novel. No offense meant to the novel at all. Howards End, however, is more typical, with the book being vastly superior.
–My YA reads have been scant, but good. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman are both Newbery-winners, so that shouldn’t surprise me.
–Zoe Heller writes terribly well about terribly unlikable people. I’m a liberal and The Believers made me hate liberals.
–The Magicians by Lev Grossman is an unusual thing. While reading it, I started to feel like it was mostly episodic and not creating a full world. But when finished, and viewed in the whole, it definitely came together. Unusual to have such a different feeling afterward, the kind of book that would be better the 2nd time.
But for this post, I’m going to mostly focus on the post I’ve been wanting to write for the past few weeks. I couldn’t write it until now because I am crazy and have been reading only massively gigantic books. (I’ve been in the middle of only two recently, a small number for me, and they’re both over 1,000 pages.)
I propose today what may look like a bizarre double feature of books, a one-two punch that is unlikely but quite effective if you’re looking for some big, fat, immersing and splendid stuff to read this summer. They are Empire Falls by Richard Russo and Under the Dome by Stephen King. (Told ya, kind of random.)
I will probably read a decent number of Russo books this year. His long long books have usually intimidated me. And their humdrum plots on small-town life never sounded quite up my alley. I want to make sure I publicly apologize to Russo because, if Empire Falls is anything like his other books, I had him completely wrong. It is long, but it is fantastically engrossing. It is about a small town with quirky characters, but they are human and interesting. The plot moves forward constantly, and manages to be both surprising and exactly right, an impressive feat.
As for King, he and I have reconciled recently. I got a very late start on him, I didn’t read a single book of his until 2004 or so. And while I found his books to be excellent diversions, they never really satisfied me. Until Lisey’s Story a few years ago. Since then I’ve seriously enjoyed his books. I didn’t have high hopes for Under the Dome, I don’t know why, but it is exactly what his old books were trying to be (like, say, The Stand, which I consider pretty flawed) and never quite managed to be. It is a bunch of corrosive and explosive material, thrown in a pot, heated to a boil. It is conflicting personalities, power and corruption, chaos and destruction, with plenty of hope and goodness thrown in. It may not have the ambitions of Lisey’s Story, but it fulfills its mission admirably.
I admit I spent the last half of the novel worrying. It was good. I couldn’t get enough. But I was worried it would suffer from one of the problems of many a King novel: a bad ending. Sometimes he seems to paint himself into a corner and not know how to get out. Never fear, it didn’t happen.
These two novels do have similarities. Both are long. Both take place in small towns. Both have lots of characters. Both are set in Maine. Both have powerful villains who are often underestimated and sympathetic, troubled heroes.
Really, though, the reason I recommend them so much as a double feature is the fact that they are both so engrossing. They stick. I have had Empire Falls in my head since it ended. And I’ve been talking about Under the Dome constantly since I started reading it. (I just finished yesterday.) They have been such utterly enjoyable experiences that I am just a little hesitant to start something new because I wonder how it could measure up.
These books have also been helpful for me since I will be moving to the Northeast this month, somewhere I haven’t lived since a stint that ended when I was in preschool. I got both these books on CD for my long work drives and I now actually recognize the New England accent, something I’ve never done before. In high school when we put on Carousel, we Western kids were all stymied by the phrase “Ay-uh” which showed up constantly in the script. I now know how to pronounce it! And I have now heard New England accents besides the ones from Good Will Hunting!
So I suggest you try this odd couple. It has definitely put me in the summer-reading-mood. I like them big, zippy, snappy, smart, poignant, and just all-around good. These certainly fit the bill, and like the best double features, they are even more fun put together.
As for me, I got a new book from the library to try, I just bought a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to re-read (only 700-ish pages!), and I am still a good 400 pages or so from finishing my big slog, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. My first Mailer, I am a bit slow to conquer that group of big male writers but I’m slowly but surely getting there. (I’ve started on Roth, Updike, and now with Mailer I wonder who’s next. Pynchon? Cheever?) I am reserving judgment at this point, except to say I have no idea how I lived in Provo (where the book is largely set) for 7 years and never heard anyone mention this book. How many books are set in Provo, particularly books by one of the most famous writers of the 20th century? And how many books are set there during the exact time period that my parents were living there? How have I never heard of this until a few months ago???
