Some Words

After adding the books I’m reading via email to my list on the sidebar, I realized that I’m reading 10 books at once. Now, obviously I’m not picking up each of these books every day. But I am part way through all of them, and feel like I don’t need to start any of them over.

I’m a fairly slow, careful reader, but I’ve started to wonder at what point I have to admit that this is stupid. I don’t usually let it get this bad. I used to consider six to be crazy.

Every time I tell myself it’s time to cut back on the booze, I got to work. Getting home from work is a distinctly booze inducing experience. I’m not drinking too much, but more often than not these days, I get home and think, sure I could relax, but a drink will make it faster. Then on days off I find myself thinking, hell, it’s happy hour and there are 2.75 pints at the BLB. Two pints, and a good book, later I find myself wondering about my alcohol intake. This is a distinctly American pastime. While we make fun of the French, they would never be so unmanly as to think a drink or two every day was a problem.

I just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics two days ago. I think I am going to write a review and put it on Iceland Spar, but for the moment I will just say that it was not bad, not as good as I first though, but not bad.

Immediately after finishing it, I started on Mrs. Dalloway. It has proven to be a much slower read. Despite being only 194 pages in the edition I own, so thoughtfully emblazoned with “The book that inspired ‘The Hours,’” it has proven a small challenge. Having really only read Orlando before this, it was intresting and oddly pleasurable, to find out what all those people had been talking about when they said she had intimidating sentence structure. The opening fifteen or so pages are nothing in construction like the rest (or what I’ve read, I must admit I’m not done yet). Part of this is the way that she uses words, and part of it is the fact that she uses semi colons like she’s getting over wartime rationing. After that, it calms down into a much more easily read book.

It has started me thinking about novel length again. Dalloway is short and compact. I was surpsied be the number of characters who get stuffed in, but so far each of them has feel fully fleshed and real, if uncomfortable. It makes Calamity Physics seem almost lazy in its wordiness. I don’t really know what to make of that. It will come up over at Iceland Spar, no doubt, but I will leave that to my post there.

A while ago I found a link to Dailyliy on some blog, likely Lifehacker. It’s a site that emails you up to three books at a time in short daily doses. Needless to say, they don’t have the current best sellers, but if you’re looking for… a drip feed of Sherlock Holmes, it has what you’re after. You can also get a bunch of the old Russian classics, spread over 500+ emails or rss entries. I don’t know what translation they use, so I’m not sure I’d go for that. But currently I’m getting Philoctetes, The Picture of Dorian Grey (which originally came out as a serial, thought probably not in 95 parts), and a collection of ghost stories.

Not a bad way to get a little reading done on the sly at work.

Edit: It appears that there is no longer a three book cap.

Against my better judgment, I just motored through the last Harry Potter book. Spoilers and stuff below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, shortly after getting up, I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I would probably have finished the night before, but my eyes were starting to hurt, it kept me going a little past that, but only just. Chabon at some point, I’m not sure when, vaulted into the position of “American writer who’s prodigious talents I most envy.”

Union is a fairly textbook noir, with a little flourish thrown in. It takes place in a fictional world, where instead of Jerusalem, the Jews got a part of Alaska after WWII. There used to be an essay on Chabon’s site, which I can’t find anymore, that detailed a book he had found called “Say it in Yiddish!” from the old Say It series of language manuals. In the essay he talks about the world in which Yiddish would actually be spoken as a still vibrant tongue. Now he has taken the time to create it.

The book feels like Chandler to me, with a slightly less convoluted plot. Of course the two authors have different ways of putting words together, but I like both of them, so I’m more than happy to be reading Chabon. In it, down and out detective Landsman must solve the murder he’s been told to give up on, before his life, and jurisdiction, come crashing down around him. The Jews are about to get kicked out of Alaska, and Landsman has no idea where he’s going to land.

Oddly enough, the thing that gave me the most pleasure reading this book was the way that Chabon introduced characters. There’s a way that the old pulps brought characters on, with just a little too much text. The characters are over the top, before they even open their mouths. Even the people who are wasting their lives are wasting them at an incredible clip. I love that feeling with pulp fiction.

And I would be lying to say I wasn’t biased. It’s not just that I love Chabon. There’s a part of me that feels a little better more calm about all the mitzvahs I’m failing to do. On some weird level I feel like reading Chabon is remedial Judaism. Like My Name is Asher Lev I feel better about not being a black hat, just by reading about the occasional black hat. I told a friend at work that he might not get the same thing out of the book that I do. Now he’s telling me that I might not get the same thing out of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, because I’m not bi-curious.

As the novel moves on, you get a little taste of the various Jewish communities that have moved to Alaska, and more than a little chess. Chabon thanks Nabakov for a chess problem in the author’s note. There’s another essay from his site… about Pale Fire, which someone borrowed from me and never returned, the bum. In this essay, Chabon talks about the need to use rare words. This ends up causing my one big complaint. There are a few times, say three, that Chabon seems to be trying to dig a word out of obscurity. Nabakov finds words that somehow seem essential, no matter how obscure. The words Chabon tries to do this to feel forced. But if That’s what I’m complaining about, that should say something.

At any rate, Jewish or not, Chabon takes you on a ride, builds a world with tantalizing hints, but not a complete picture of the whole, and leaves you at the end feeling like it’s a solid ending. That’s another thing I envy him for. His endings feel like endings. I’m always amazed by how few authors can do that.

After being Mr. Mean to Delillo about Underworld, it’s comforting to see his latest novel being received with a resounding ‘meh.’ The Guardian digested version does little to up the excitement. I mentioned this to Colin the other day, and he seem less than inspired to read. What does it say when the reviews make the book feel like a rehash of a rehash?

From the digest of the new work:

Memory, matter, age. Every-thing was pixellating into abstraction.

From Underworld:

All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborn form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders, and stray yawns, the sand-grain mannyness of things that can’t be counted.
It is all falling indelibly into the past.

P.S. If you aren’t reading the Bookslut blog, and thus realizing what a stinking cheat I’m being with this post, you’re missing out.

Edit: Actually, now that I’ve had a moment with those two quotes, I think they play nicely against each other.

All my life I’ve made a habit of starting to do more than I know I can handle. It’s not hard to forsee that this will have mixed results. And so, amid a miriad of projects, posting fell to the wayside. And now, suddenly, I find myself with two places to post.

And so, fortified with a little gin, some lime, and a few other things mixed in, I’m trying to dig out of that hole.

Oh, and the lime was squeezed by one of these. I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. It’s totally simplified the most annoying part of drink making for me. God bless eBay.

And before I really dig in, there has been a lot of talk about books and length here and over at Iceland Spar. Here is a link to Marginal Revolution that relates nicely to what I’ve been saying. Remember, you will be tested.

For this post, I’m going to be using the word novella to stand in for a story of between 20 and 60 thousand words.

Novellas are the ghetto of writing. Unless you are already famous enough to get stuff published by name alone, or you are writing children’s fiction, it’s going to be hard. And still, I think that novellas are what many people should be focusing on.

My first reason for feeling this way is a personal one. I don’t read very quickly. There are a lot of novels out there, and you’re never going to get around to reading them all, or even all of the cream of the crop. In such a situation, there is a faint arrogance to the act of writing a novel of great length. By doing so, you are saying that your words do not merely justify my reading them, but they justify my not reading someone else’s words. Now, to a degree this is true for any novel, but long novels just seem to flaunt it.

I’m going to pick on Underworld, by Delillo, as I think it is the poster child for bloated arrogance. My edition of the novel is over 800 very large pages long. In those 800 pages Delillo makes a desperate play to cram all of America into one book. Can you think of something more doomed to failure? The reader jumps from person to person with no rhyme or reason. Sometimes you get something just to have a moment that was important to history. None of the characters were involved in it? Just add another character! You don’t need to come back to him. I’d give a perfunctory plot synopsis, but no such thing is possible. On top of it all the end clearly exposes Delillo as having no grasp of the internet, and how one can write about it.

It has moments of brilliance in it. There are a few scenes of truly amazing power, but the amount of shit you have to wade through to get them is amazing. It reads like he was trying to write a parody of Pynchon and then forgot it was a parody about one hundred pages in. He has enough material for four of five books with actual plots, but instead he chooses to give me dozens of “slices of life.”

How does this relate to the novella? A novella is long enough to have a plot with a twist or two, some character development, and a setting for the reader to settle into. Despite this, it can be read in a day or two by a dedicated reader. It does not claim so much time for the reader that they are burdened by it. When I get bogged down in a very long novel, it tends to slow or stop my reading on all fronts. When I read a novella, I’m through it in a day or two and then I’m on to the next author. If I really liked the novella? I read another one by the author.

I’ll put it a little more explicitly, a novella and a novel are both thought of as “books.” People sit down to read a book, not a novel or novella. That book is thought of as a concrete unit of experience. Very few novels of significant length net greater or lesser emotional results than novellas.

To illustrate, The Great Gatsby is an excellent example of a book in the short novel or long novella range, which is of undeniable quality. It is tightly plotted and gives up nothing in structure to larger works. Despite it’s emotional impact, symbolism, and social commentary, it does not demand of its reader a great deal of time. Is it better or worse than the Brother’s Karamazov? On grounds of literature, it would be pointless to argue, but in terms of investment, Gatsby has the advantage, because it demands less of your time.

Next up: Novellas Part II – Novellas and Genre Fiction

This is turning into a three or four parter…

All right. I will be getting to novellas today, but first, a little something from Boing Boing yesterday.

Book promotion must be a tricky thing, as I’m always hearing that reading is on decline, and that the number of books published increases every year. So given that, book marketing must be blood sport. Right? Ok, maybe not. Anyhow, Mirranda July, who’s short story in the New Yorker did not fall into that “wow this is bland” category, has a new book out.

If it’s as good as the short story, it will be quite good indeed. But that’s not why I’m posting. Boing Boing pointed me to the promotional page, as designed by July. It’s fun. It also made me want to buy the book. Well done.

I keep The Valve on my RSS feed, and sometimes I’m sorely tempted to just take it off the list. It’s not that it never has anything interesting to say, indeed it catches my attention at least once every day or two. But there are some decidedly frustrating aspects of it, like the titles of the damn posts, which I think I’ve griped about in the past.

This may be part of why I loved this post by one Scott Eric Kaufman. It’s pointed out in the comments that this has already been done to death, but it was a great post anyway. It seems n+1 ruffled some feathers by saying that blogs are a troublesome medium for criticism, which seems a bit obvious, given how quickly topics get old in blog land. Others did not seem to think it so.

Bonus: Contains the quoted phrase “I shit on Dante.”

All around just a fun summation of lit crits and would be lit crits being really catty with each other.

For a while now, there has been a little list on the side bar of the page. This list shows all the books I’m reading. I tend to be one of those people who has six started, and cycles through them until one grabs him, and then ads a new one when it’s done. This list had amazon.com links, and it was possible to earn a little kickback if people bought through the link. As originally set up, it went to the guy who wrote the little plugin. I changed that last night. I figured on the off chance that someone did buy something through the link, I might as well get a kickback, and ten months was enough of a thank you for the author of the plugin. Or something…

Anyhow, I set that up so that the money comes back to me. Because… why not? Books manage to be one of the biggest expenses in my life. I should go to the library and borrow them, but somehow I just feel compelled to own them. So now, strangely enough, I feel compelled to disclose that buying books through those links gets me money. You’ve been warned. If you feel like buying, please don’t let me stop you. But also don’t feel like you have to. There are over twenty books I’ve bought or been given that I have yet to read. I’m not likely to run out.

A few days ago I finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the last few months I’ve read several Murakami, and they have all been good. Sometimes the end has frustrated me, but they have all been worth the price of admission.

What I’ve found is that Murakami starts to hijack your brain in strange ways. I might have to take a break from him, though there are still several books that appeal.

Wind-Up Bird is the story of a man named Toru. He starts out looking for a cat, and he ends up looking for his wife. Like most of Murakami’s male characters, he’s amazingly passive. At one point in the book a girl tells him that he is fighting as hard as he can for his wife, and yet he’s spending most of his time sitting around his house. Despite all the press Murakami gets for the psychic prostitutes, talking monkeys, and possessing sheep in his stories, it is the way his main characters act that is the most surreal. Yet the passive nature of many of his characters actually lends a touch of realism. Neal Stephenson has a line in Snow Crash, in which he says that all men like to dream that they could, with the right set of circumstances, become the most bad ass man imaginable. Murakami’s heroes have no such illusions, or if they do, their concept of bad ass is amazingly different from America’s.

I like that. Let’s face it. If a normal person were confronted with some of the situations that Murakami puts his protagonists into, the only thing they

could

do would be to sit around feeling a little confused. Murakami’s characters go with the flow like normal people, and it is often the best thing for them, even when you feel like screaming at them to take action.

It’s a dense novel, but one that can be enjoyably read without feeling compelled to unpack it. There were times that I found myself thinking about the references, resonances, and what might be symbolic of what, and enjoying it. It’s been a long time since I felt a book was that playful. It’s also sprouting books of criticism at fairly impressive rate, though it’s no where near as dissected as many Nabokov books are, while feeling like it might actually hold up to that level of inspection. At the very least it felt at several points like a novel that had to be reread if you wanted to really know it. That was also refreshing, though it might be a while before I actually reread it, as I have over 25 books that I actually own and have yet to read, with more calling out. There’s never enough time.

I also just finished The Kite Runner, but that’s going to be another post.