booklog

Tin House #38

The Club Dumas, Perez-Reverte. The book that became The 9th Gate.

Richard III, Norton Critical Edition.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Potocki.

The Tragedy of King Richard the Second; The History of Henry the Fourth; The Second Part of Henry the Fourth; The Life of Henry the Fifth; The First Part of Henry the Sixth; The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (2 Henry VI); The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth (3 Henry VI). The Norton Shakespeare. Good vacation reading.

The Fall of Carthage, Goldsworthy.

Dido, Queen of Carthage; Edward the Second; Tamburlaine The Great, Parts 1 and 2. Marlowe, Penguin Classics. Equally good reading on the, er, second vacation.

Eclipse, John Shirley.

The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred, Vallgren.

Respected Sir, Mahfouz.

Almost Transparent Blue, Murakami. Pointless junkie-narrative.

The Wrestler's Cruel Study, Dobyns.

American Psycho, Ellis. This was as much a delight to read, having seen the film, as Fight Club was a disappointment.

booklog

n+1 #7

The Death of Virgil, Broch. Covered elsewhere.

The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club, Slavin. Surprisingly dull and unsurprising stories, given the subject matter.

The End of Mr Y, Thomas. This one really sounds like a fun ride: a cursed book whose readers die mysteriously, dimensional travel, communication with spirits and the afterlife, a literary mystery. So why is it such a horrible read? It just comes across as unconvincing. Even quite-probable details like the promiscuity of the main character come across as tales told by a chronic liar, when handled by this author. And the giant mouse spirit guide who's kept alive by a group of schoolkids running a webpage -- come on, that's just silly.

Vital Speeches of the Day, Jan '09, Feb '09

Emerson: Mind On Fire, Richardson. A mighty tome, containing everything there is to know about the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lapham's Quarterly, Vol 1 #3: "Book of Nature"

The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral, Francis Bacon.

Anthony and Cleopatra, The Oxford Shakespeare.

Time Famine, Olsen. Quite disappointing, given how long I've been trying to find a copy of this book. Perhaps I should have read it when it came out back in the 90s, before I got critical of writing styles where every noun has its adjective (if not a family of them), where descriptive sentences tend toward the comma-delimited run-on, and where the generally fun use of proper nouns as adjectives becomes redundant, even oppressive.

Autobiography and Other Writings, Benjamin Franklin (Oxford)

Lost Christianities, Bart Ehrman.

The Atlas, Vollmann. Essays of travels to the third world (and, uh, San Francisco) that would be much more enjoyable if Vollman could either go all the way with his attempts at stream-of-consciousness, or abandon it altogether. And if the subject of every story wasn't in some way or other about Vollman getting laid, trying to get laid, or failing to get laid. The only thing more disturbing than the number of times he tells a woman with whom he shares no common language "I love you" is that he may be simple enough to believe it himself.

Lapham's Quarterly, Vol 2 #1: "Eros"

The Tempest, Norton Critical Edition.

Ben Franklin, dolphin eater

Friday, Sept. 2.

This morning the wind changed; a little fair. We caught a couple of dolphins, and fried them for dinner. They eat indifferent well.

...

Wednesday, Sept. 7.

The wind is somewhat abated, but the sea is very high still. A dolphin kept us company all this afternoon; we struck at him several times, but could not take him.

...

Friday, Sept. 9.
This afternoon we took four large dolphins, three with a hook and line, and the fourth we struck with a fizgig. The bait was a candle with two feathers stuck in it, one on each side, in imitation of a flying-fish, which are the common prey of the dolphins. They appeared extremely eager and hungry, and snapped up the hook as soon as ever it touched the water. When we came to open them, we found in the belly of one a small dolphin, half digested. Certainly they were half-famished, or are naturally very savage, to devour those of their own species.

Saturday, Sept. 10.

This day we dined upon the dollphins we caught yesterday, three of them sufficing the whole ship, being twenty-one persons.

Ben Franklin's Journal: Voyage

Death of Virgil

It would be remiss not to devote an entire post to a book that took nearly a year to finish.

The work in question is Herman Broch's The Death of Virgil, which is much less a novel than it is a weapon of last resort developed in concentration camps for use against the Nazis.

The book is written in stream of consciousness fashion -- think Finnegan's Wake with half the cleverness and twice the pretension. Bosch attempts to capture the complexity of a classical symphony in language: recurring themes, exaggeration of tempo, and so forth. What this boils down to are highly repetitive sentences of amazing length -- some so many pages long that they have to be broken up arbitrarily into paragraphs, probably due to some publisher's equivalent of the Geneva Conventions.

It is this grandiose goal which proves the downfall of the novel, for it has quite good things to say about the nature of art, the duty of the artist, and the philosophy of death, as it were. Barring the exceedingly distracting hallucinatory episodes, there is a compelling portrait of Virgil and his times. With some restraint, either limiting the too-clever-by-half use of language, or leaving it to another (hopefully shorter) work, this could have been quite a powerful novel.

In the end, it is a prime candidate for the Emersonian technique: skim the book lightly and quickly, letting your eyes discover for themselves what they may, rather than attempting any deep or thorough immersion in the text.

booklog

Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, Honan. Good, but a bit too academic for the casual reader.

Nothing Like The Sun, Burgess. Shakespeare considered as a protagonist. Enjoyable, especially in tandem with the above.

Electric Church, Somers. Truly painfully-written first novel in the cyberpunk vein; I damn near developed a tic in the first chapter, I was wincing so often. Good idea-fiction, though, and by the end of the novel I was enjoying myself immensely.

Tin House #37

On Writing, King. A short biography and a short reminisce on the trade of writing by the only man who can be said to truly understand it. Highly, highly recommended, and not just for aspiring writers.

Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton, Home. I generally like Stewart Home and his de Sade style of porno-philosophic writing: Red London, Slow Death, and 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess were all excellent. Down and Out, with its Orwell-inspired title (but not theme, unfortunately), was quite a disappointment.

In Praise of Folly, Erasmus. I can't recall what made me read this again, but it was mostly as bad as the first time. There are 10 or 20 good pages about 50 pages in, but for the most part it is only of historical (read: academic) interest.

The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham. One of the best books there is about a misanthrope.

The Productive Programmer, Ford. Tips on being a more productive programmer. If you need to read it, then you definitely should.

Observatory Mansions

Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions is the story of a handful of neurotic misanthropes who live in a curiously isolated apartment complex in what appears to be London. A new tenant moves in, resulting in a sea of change, including a few deaths and a lot of reconciliation with the past.

The characters are certainly interesting and eccentric. The narrator, with his deep abiding distrust of humanity projected on the people he encounters and his meticulously cataloged collection of garbage, has the least redeeming qualities of any of them.

It is hard describe the book as compelling, however, even when events are building to a climax at the end. It was very similar to reading The Wasp Factory; the events that unfold are unusual and interesting, but ultimately one is left thinking "So what?".

Shriek: An Afterword

Jeff Vandermeer's Shriek, an Afterword is a novel-length followup to his story "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris" apparently written immediately afterwards (1999 for the story, and 199-2006 for the novel).

Shriek tells the story of the author of "Early History", narrated by his sister, annotated by himself, and edited by their employer at Hoegbotton Books. In keeping with the style of "Early History", these individuals are given their voice in different components in the work; the sister speaks in the main text, the author in his annotations (similar to his persona appearing in the footnotes of "Early History"), and the editor in the appendix.

The story itself is biographical, tracing the backgrounds of the author and his sister from childhood through recent events that have radically changed the city itself (Ambergris, a setting for perhaps too many of Vandermeer's tales). The setting is purely fantasy genre, though to dismiss Vandermeer as a fantasy writer would be a disservice to one of the most imaginative writers out there.

A bit tough to start into, a bit slow at times, but ultimately a rewarding read with some interesting commentary on fame, ambition, and obsession.

Apathy and other small victories

Pail Neilan's Apathy and Other Small Victories is the kind of book one loves to hate. A first-person narrative of a self-deprecating but narcissistic slacker, with no plot or character development to speak of: this is the type of book of which there are too many, all done poorly.

Except Neilan is hilarious. The book opens with a darkly humorous tone that is maintained consistently throughout the book, even when trying to wrap up the story through exposition (always a bad sign!) at the end. No mean feat.

It is difficult to describe this as a good book, but it is a quick and very enjoyable read. Easy to lend out, even to non-readers.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence is not a feelgood novel.

The book takes the form of the diary of Lola, a 12-year old girl growing up in the dystopian near-future New York that is the setting of many of Womack's stories: riots in Harlem, the Army dealing with Long Island insurgents, the 14 Street Wall.

The downward spiral of Lola and her family as they run out of first money, then options, is sure to tug on a heartstring or two. Stylistically, the form works well, with Lola's voice getting more and more street-level as things go on.

Desperation, poverty, racism, and yes, violence. Highly recommended.

Hermit In Paris

America in the 50s and 60s viewed through the eyes of an Italian Communist.

Italo Calvino's collection of autobiographical essays, Hermit in Paris, has many intriguing essays: his soul-searching over Stalin, his portrait of Mussolini, the occasional soliloquy over a favorite town. A few of the more political essays, as well as the ones dealing with his peers, become tedious.

The highlight of the collection is of course the diary of his travels across the United States, especially his time in New York dealing with different publishers. This would make a fine standalone book, and is recommended for all who like the American travelogues of writers (e.g. Democracy in America, Air-Conditioned Nightmare).

Soul Mountain

I started Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain about a week into my vacation, and it feels like it took forever to finish.

This is one of those books that you find yourself reading a page or two at a time, sometimes re-reading the same paragraph three or four times, sometimes flipping back to earlier chapters.

It certainly wasn't what I expected. No long rumination on man's condition or the nature of belief and hope in the course of a pilgrimage. Which is good, as either of those would have gotten old real quick.

The novel is purely character-driven. The chapters are episodic, some telling anecdotes, some providing historical insight, some simply representing scenes or moods. These tend to be either entertaining or insightful, though there are a few that feel purposeless.

Towards the end of the book, the author addresses potential critics, defending his work and justifying his approach. This may sound arrogant, but it actually works in this case, it let's you know the author hasn't lost it, and that the book itself has no direction or resolution, and that allows you to leisurely enjoy the remainder of the book.

Overall, a very memorable book, and one that certainly gives you pause for reflection. Probably not one that you're going to lend out or read again though.

The Spider's House

I hadn't finished Paul Bowle's The Spider's House before my trip, so I brought it along for the plane ride; I was so wrapped up in the tale by then that I couldn't leave it home.

This book provides three views of Morocco in the 50's: the outsider view that the Moroccans are barbaric and require, like children, the guidance of their superiors; the outsider view that Moroccans have a unique, beautiful culture which should be preserved as an alternative to the west; and the insider view of a Morocco that is falling apart due to not only the influence of foreigners, but also (and largely) due to the hypocrisy and self-serving opportunism of its political and spiritual leaders.

The first view is assumed to be that of the reader, so only background characters voice it. The other two views are provided by the two protagonists; one an American writer, viewed as idealistic and naive by his English and American neighbors at the hotel, the other an Arab youth, who wants to shirk duty and lie in the sun all day, but gets drawn into the struggle against France by his birthright.

This book is a fantastic demonstration of the gap between largely alien cultures, and provides good, often insightful character studies of the kind of people who attempt to cross these gaps, themselves often strangers in their own cultures.

I/O

I picked up Simon Logan's I/O a few months back along with a bunch of other independent and self-published fiction (from Mellick, et. al.), back before I learned the true value of an editor. Being a collection of short stories, the omission isn't as painful here, though a decent copy editor would certainly have caught the grammatical errors.

This is a thin volume of 8 very similar stories: various loners in industrial settings (junkyards, factories, wastelands) striving after women who wound them. The final story, of course, proving the exception to this rule and revolving around a group of women who seduce and kill celebrities.

The writing is young and self-indulgent: every verb has its adverb, every noun its adjectives, every sentence its string of clauses that enhance, support, or belabor a simple subject-verb-object combination. Unpolished prose.

Some of the ideas are interesting enough, "Ignition" being the most fun to read, "Foetal Chambers" and "Irong Lung" having good rough concepts (if sparse treatment), and "Method of Pulse" visualized well enough to make a decent animated short. So there is promise.

Taken as a whole, though, the work is too amateurish to be worth reading. The ideas, the writing, even the setting of these "industrial fiction" stories have a from-the-hip feel: not considered, not thought out, not crafted. All in all, a slow, rough read.

The Atrocity Exhibition

This is a novel (?) that I've wanted to read for a long time, ever since RE/Search reproduced it along with Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden in a half-hearted attempt to re-release banned books. The RE/Search editions had pictures, so I had to find proper editions of these: the Mirbeau at a used bookstore somewhere between the Tenderloin and North Beach, the Ballard at a mall (!) bookstore in England. Guess they've stopped banning it.

I was a bit disappointed. The narrative is nonlinear and fragmented, but in some sense having direction as each segment helps illuminate those that follow. Ballard recommends reading the segments at random, as that is how he wrote it. This is known, in the reading trade, as a bad sign. Still, one of my favorite Ballard shorts, "The Assassination of President Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Race", was included in this book, so I gave it a go.

Essentially, the protagonist has many selves (one in each chapter) who all try to use collections of seemingly unrelated objects (generally, but not exclusively, photos, artwork, and fragments of text) as a catalyst for changing (and understanding) reality. It's hard to get more specific without rewriting the entire book; suffice to say that many of the obsessions found in Ballard's later work are here (Crash and Super-Cannes probably being the most obvious), as well as a few mid-sixties fixations (pop art, the space race, the JFK assassination to name a few).

As experimental fiction, I cannot judge it. As a novel, or as a collection of short stories, it is outshone by virtually everything else Ballard has written. As a window into the mind of the author, however, it is fantastic -- especially the new edition with Ballard's endnotes.