Booklogging in America
May. 14th, 2010 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneHey, and now that the Renegade Angels reveals are up, I can finally post this booklog! (Yes, that is the excuse I am going to continue to use for being so miserably behind.)
21. Patriotism, Yukio Mishima — Reading this book is sort of what I’d imagine watching a snuff film would be like. The story is a simple one: a young soldier in ’30s Japan comes home and informs his wife that in order to preserve his honor, he must commit seppuku before the night is through. The wife proves her love and devotion by agreeing to go with him, so they calmly organize their affairs, make love one last time, and then kill themselves. All of this is beautifully, and in fact, lovingly described. Parts of it, especially as the couple take comfort in each other’s bodies a final time, are moving in a mournful, bittersweet way. I’ve written some apocalyptic fiction and I’d love to be able to capture that sort of mood so well.
However, all of this is sort of spoiled by the fact that what the couple is doing is completely ridiculous. The idea of ritualistic suicide is bizarre to me, and in the case of this book, you can’t even fool yourself into thinking that the author might be subtly critiquing the practice, as Mishima himself later committed seppuku. Think about that for a moment. Read Mishima’s incredibly detailed description of ritual disembowelment and think about that. Or, you know, don’t. I won’t judge you. I spent several hours after I finished reading this slim novella feeling sick to my stomach, it’s so graphic—and I say this as someone who read Exquisite Corpse while munching on a burrito. It’s the rare piece of literature that can achieve that level of effectiveness.
So yeah, it’s a snuff film. But it’s an unusually stylish and well-directed one.
22. Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan — Okay, I’ll admit it: I don’t get it.
I may need to start singing the “Small World” song, however, as I happened to notice that this book is dedicated to someone named Ron Loewinsohn. “Huh,” I thought. “I had a professor at Berkeley named Ron Loewinsohn. I wonder if it could be the same guy?”
Two minutes of Wikipedia research reveals: yup! Same dude! Apparently he and Brautigan were good friends back in the day. Many years later, Loewinsohn is vying for the title of my favorite college professor. (It’s between him and an enthusiastic Irishman who wore waistcoats all the time and liked to talk about his Jane Austen fanfiction. That Loewinsohn’s neck-and-neck with this guy shows what an awesome lecturer he was.) Now I’m tempted to write him an email. Maybe something like, “Hi, not sure you remember me—I wrote that essay on Huckleberry Finn you really liked? Just wanted to say thanks for being such a great teacher. P.S. PLEASE EXPLAIN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN AND TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA TO ME. I DON’T GET IT.”
I’m sure that would go over well.
23. If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino — Deliciously meta romp through books and the book world and book people. Calvino veers into obscure places sometimes, but there was enough warmth and humor and cleverness here to keep me rooted to the page. One of the first things I thought when I was done was, “I want to do the fandom version of this! I want to write a story called If on a winter's night a fangirl!” So then I did.
Anyway, since I'm at the stage of comfortably ripping him off, I guess I can say I finally get what the big deal about Calvino is. Success!
24. Bad Nature, Javier Marías — If you float around in certain semi-pretentious bookish circles, Javier Marías is one of those names you hear tossed around, usually coupled with a statement like, “is going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature!” As pretentious as I'm sure I myself can be at times, a statement such as this is actually not likely to make me rush out and want to read a writer's work. The Nobel Prize committee and I do not seem to have terribly similar tastes. Do I need to go off again about how much I hated Blindness? No, I don't think I do.
So this guy Marías: I was suspicious. Especially because the previous work of his we'd carried was his epic Your Face Tomorrow, which I've heard described as “1,000 pages detailing 10 minutes of espionage.” Further, when I peeked at the first volume's first page, it seemed to consist of a single paragraph and some infinitely long sentences. Not really my cuppa.
But then Bad Nature arrived, and it was of a much more manageable size, and it had an amusing subtitle (or With Elvis in Mexico). I opened it up and yup, there were those long, twisty sentences again, but suddenly I found them addictive and compelling—they grabbed me like an undertow and dragged me into this bizarre, hilarious, and wonderfully dark tale of Elvis' Spanish translator and the scary shenanigans he and the King get up to in Mexico while shooting a film. This short little book really is like a whirlpool: it's exhilarating to find yourself sucked in, tossed around—narrowly avoiding some sharp rocks—and then chucked back out again. I resort to metaphor because a large portion of the joy of this story is discovering it for yourself, being surprised by it. I for one was not expecting such humor and verve. If they're at all like this, then 1,000 pages detailing 10 minutes of espionage do not sound at all bad to me. Hell, go ahead and throw in that Nobel Prize.
25. Tales of Desire, Tennessee Williams — Whoa! Unexpected cannibalism is unexpected! I mean, I guess on the one hand, it shouldn’t be—this is Tennessee Williams, after all; I’ve read Suddenly Last Summer. But still. That’ll make sure you’re paying attention.
These short stories veered wildly between being sort of tragic and awesome, and being kind of ridiculously OTT and bad. The earlier ones were my favorites; by the time I reached the last story, which was written in the ’70s, I felt like I was reading C-level Armistead Maupin shenanigans. The whole collection has left me feeling confused, but not entirely in a bad way? I don’t know. It’s also possible that my brain simply never recovered from the SURPRISE CANNIBALISM.
26. Everything Matters!, Ron Currie, Jr. — I think this book really suffered from when I read it. It contains a lot of things that I am prone to like—unusual narrative techniques! angsty young geniuses! the apocalypse!—but also a lot of things that I hate, such as women getting fridged for the sole purpose of furthering the main dude's angst. SIGH. Hot on the heels of Horns and...I don't know, pretty much the whole of angsty dude literature ever, I have had enough of this particular cliché. I'm also sick of narratives that build to a BIG EPIC CHOICE that is essentially false—in this case, should the main character choose to try to save the world, or to not be a douche to his loved ones? Currie obviously expects the reader to nod solemnly and wipe away a tear when he CHOOSES HIS LOVED ONES. But gosh, I don't know: WHY NOT DO BOTH? I don't see for a second why the two should be mutually exclusive. Am I crazy?
So yes, there are some lovely moments in this book. But way too much about it bugged me. For a book so liberally sewn with the seeds of innovation, I found it seriously disappointing to see the same tired paths being ploughed again and again.
27. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower — The word I keep wanting to use to describe this short story collection is “masculine.” Customers give me weird looks when I do this. But I suppose it's still better than the other phrase I could use: “Whoa-ho-ho, hello, daddy issues!”
This is a collection all about manly men in the height of their manliness, doing manly things like hunting deer and having questionable affairs with questionable women, all while suffering from some seriously bad cases of Manpain (a.k.a. Mangst), and failing to connect with their fathers and/or brothers. It's really quite good though. Tower's writing is incisive and vivid, and these stories frequently don't go where one might expect. Nor do they just...trail off, end unresolved, like my least favorite but highly common type of short story does. The emotional stakes are high here, folks! Reading this collection will leave you feeling rather ravaged. And kind of like you might want to don a bunch of plaid and pose for the front of a Brawny paper towels package.
28. Wild at Heart, Patricia Gaffney — In which Sydney's anthropologist father finds a wild man in the woods, and Sydney and the dude raised by wolves fall in looooooove, and then Wolf Man turns out to actually be a lost Scottish Lord, making his union with Sydney socially acceptable for the 19th century. Yay?
Here's what I like about Patricia Gaffney: she's infinitely more readable than pretty much any other romance novelist I've discovered. She's willing to tackle wonderfully crackish plots—I mean, this one is practically a het'd up due South AU. And her heroes are wonderfully, refreshingly not alpha males, and her heroines are not blushing virgins who need to be manhandled for their own good. Instead, her ladies are competent and confident and the dudes are often the ones who are virginal or shy. Score!
And yet I still come away from Gaffney's books wishing they'd been more transgressive. How can I not roll my eyes at last minute, “oh wait, I'm a lord, let's have socially-acceptable sexytiems nao”? Also, both of the Gaffney books I've read so far were way too long and dragged in the middle. So close! So close and yet so far!
But if you want some crackish profic romance, however, Gaffney's close to the best I've found at this point. She should write an amnesia or a bodyswap book. I'd totally read that.
29. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino — Wait, shit, now I think I'm back to not understanding Calvino again. I mean, I think I got at least part of this book intellectually, but emotionally it did nothing for me. The language was at times beautiful and clever and compelling, but mostly I was sitting here thinking, “And...?” or, like, waiting for Marco Polo and Kublai Khan to make out or something. Can someone who was affected positively by this book tell me why it worked for them?
30. Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, Justin Taylor — More short stories, of varying quality, and with many wandering into the dime a dozen, disaffected young hipster side of things. Yawn. But a couple of these were really good. I especially liked the apocalyptic Tetris story. With all the books, and specifically short story collections, that I read, I tend to feel pretty impressed if an author manages to write even one story that sticks with me so favorably. That's how I feel about this Tetris story. And, uh. That's not a sentence I get to write often.
Total Reviews: 30/82
If my occasionally remembering to update this booklog is not enough for you, you can enjoy a daily dose of book nonsense on my work blog! (And if these occasional booklog posts are far more than enough...um. Sorry?)
21. Patriotism, Yukio Mishima — Reading this book is sort of what I’d imagine watching a snuff film would be like. The story is a simple one: a young soldier in ’30s Japan comes home and informs his wife that in order to preserve his honor, he must commit seppuku before the night is through. The wife proves her love and devotion by agreeing to go with him, so they calmly organize their affairs, make love one last time, and then kill themselves. All of this is beautifully, and in fact, lovingly described. Parts of it, especially as the couple take comfort in each other’s bodies a final time, are moving in a mournful, bittersweet way. I’ve written some apocalyptic fiction and I’d love to be able to capture that sort of mood so well.
However, all of this is sort of spoiled by the fact that what the couple is doing is completely ridiculous. The idea of ritualistic suicide is bizarre to me, and in the case of this book, you can’t even fool yourself into thinking that the author might be subtly critiquing the practice, as Mishima himself later committed seppuku. Think about that for a moment. Read Mishima’s incredibly detailed description of ritual disembowelment and think about that. Or, you know, don’t. I won’t judge you. I spent several hours after I finished reading this slim novella feeling sick to my stomach, it’s so graphic—and I say this as someone who read Exquisite Corpse while munching on a burrito. It’s the rare piece of literature that can achieve that level of effectiveness.
So yeah, it’s a snuff film. But it’s an unusually stylish and well-directed one.
22. Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan — Okay, I’ll admit it: I don’t get it.
I may need to start singing the “Small World” song, however, as I happened to notice that this book is dedicated to someone named Ron Loewinsohn. “Huh,” I thought. “I had a professor at Berkeley named Ron Loewinsohn. I wonder if it could be the same guy?”
Two minutes of Wikipedia research reveals: yup! Same dude! Apparently he and Brautigan were good friends back in the day. Many years later, Loewinsohn is vying for the title of my favorite college professor. (It’s between him and an enthusiastic Irishman who wore waistcoats all the time and liked to talk about his Jane Austen fanfiction. That Loewinsohn’s neck-and-neck with this guy shows what an awesome lecturer he was.) Now I’m tempted to write him an email. Maybe something like, “Hi, not sure you remember me—I wrote that essay on Huckleberry Finn you really liked? Just wanted to say thanks for being such a great teacher. P.S. PLEASE EXPLAIN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN AND TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA TO ME. I DON’T GET IT.”
I’m sure that would go over well.
23. If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino — Deliciously meta romp through books and the book world and book people. Calvino veers into obscure places sometimes, but there was enough warmth and humor and cleverness here to keep me rooted to the page. One of the first things I thought when I was done was, “I want to do the fandom version of this! I want to write a story called If on a winter's night a fangirl!” So then I did.
Anyway, since I'm at the stage of comfortably ripping him off, I guess I can say I finally get what the big deal about Calvino is. Success!
24. Bad Nature, Javier Marías — If you float around in certain semi-pretentious bookish circles, Javier Marías is one of those names you hear tossed around, usually coupled with a statement like, “is going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature!” As pretentious as I'm sure I myself can be at times, a statement such as this is actually not likely to make me rush out and want to read a writer's work. The Nobel Prize committee and I do not seem to have terribly similar tastes. Do I need to go off again about how much I hated Blindness? No, I don't think I do.
So this guy Marías: I was suspicious. Especially because the previous work of his we'd carried was his epic Your Face Tomorrow, which I've heard described as “1,000 pages detailing 10 minutes of espionage.” Further, when I peeked at the first volume's first page, it seemed to consist of a single paragraph and some infinitely long sentences. Not really my cuppa.
But then Bad Nature arrived, and it was of a much more manageable size, and it had an amusing subtitle (or With Elvis in Mexico). I opened it up and yup, there were those long, twisty sentences again, but suddenly I found them addictive and compelling—they grabbed me like an undertow and dragged me into this bizarre, hilarious, and wonderfully dark tale of Elvis' Spanish translator and the scary shenanigans he and the King get up to in Mexico while shooting a film. This short little book really is like a whirlpool: it's exhilarating to find yourself sucked in, tossed around—narrowly avoiding some sharp rocks—and then chucked back out again. I resort to metaphor because a large portion of the joy of this story is discovering it for yourself, being surprised by it. I for one was not expecting such humor and verve. If they're at all like this, then 1,000 pages detailing 10 minutes of espionage do not sound at all bad to me. Hell, go ahead and throw in that Nobel Prize.
25. Tales of Desire, Tennessee Williams — Whoa! Unexpected cannibalism is unexpected! I mean, I guess on the one hand, it shouldn’t be—this is Tennessee Williams, after all; I’ve read Suddenly Last Summer. But still. That’ll make sure you’re paying attention.
These short stories veered wildly between being sort of tragic and awesome, and being kind of ridiculously OTT and bad. The earlier ones were my favorites; by the time I reached the last story, which was written in the ’70s, I felt like I was reading C-level Armistead Maupin shenanigans. The whole collection has left me feeling confused, but not entirely in a bad way? I don’t know. It’s also possible that my brain simply never recovered from the SURPRISE CANNIBALISM.
26. Everything Matters!, Ron Currie, Jr. — I think this book really suffered from when I read it. It contains a lot of things that I am prone to like—unusual narrative techniques! angsty young geniuses! the apocalypse!—but also a lot of things that I hate, such as women getting fridged for the sole purpose of furthering the main dude's angst. SIGH. Hot on the heels of Horns and...I don't know, pretty much the whole of angsty dude literature ever, I have had enough of this particular cliché. I'm also sick of narratives that build to a BIG EPIC CHOICE that is essentially false—in this case, should the main character choose to try to save the world, or to not be a douche to his loved ones? Currie obviously expects the reader to nod solemnly and wipe away a tear when he CHOOSES HIS LOVED ONES. But gosh, I don't know: WHY NOT DO BOTH? I don't see for a second why the two should be mutually exclusive. Am I crazy?
So yes, there are some lovely moments in this book. But way too much about it bugged me. For a book so liberally sewn with the seeds of innovation, I found it seriously disappointing to see the same tired paths being ploughed again and again.
27. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower — The word I keep wanting to use to describe this short story collection is “masculine.” Customers give me weird looks when I do this. But I suppose it's still better than the other phrase I could use: “Whoa-ho-ho, hello, daddy issues!”
This is a collection all about manly men in the height of their manliness, doing manly things like hunting deer and having questionable affairs with questionable women, all while suffering from some seriously bad cases of Manpain (a.k.a. Mangst), and failing to connect with their fathers and/or brothers. It's really quite good though. Tower's writing is incisive and vivid, and these stories frequently don't go where one might expect. Nor do they just...trail off, end unresolved, like my least favorite but highly common type of short story does. The emotional stakes are high here, folks! Reading this collection will leave you feeling rather ravaged. And kind of like you might want to don a bunch of plaid and pose for the front of a Brawny paper towels package.
28. Wild at Heart, Patricia Gaffney — In which Sydney's anthropologist father finds a wild man in the woods, and Sydney and the dude raised by wolves fall in looooooove, and then Wolf Man turns out to actually be a lost Scottish Lord, making his union with Sydney socially acceptable for the 19th century. Yay?
Here's what I like about Patricia Gaffney: she's infinitely more readable than pretty much any other romance novelist I've discovered. She's willing to tackle wonderfully crackish plots—I mean, this one is practically a het'd up due South AU. And her heroes are wonderfully, refreshingly not alpha males, and her heroines are not blushing virgins who need to be manhandled for their own good. Instead, her ladies are competent and confident and the dudes are often the ones who are virginal or shy. Score!
And yet I still come away from Gaffney's books wishing they'd been more transgressive. How can I not roll my eyes at last minute, “oh wait, I'm a lord, let's have socially-acceptable sexytiems nao”? Also, both of the Gaffney books I've read so far were way too long and dragged in the middle. So close! So close and yet so far!
But if you want some crackish profic romance, however, Gaffney's close to the best I've found at this point. She should write an amnesia or a bodyswap book. I'd totally read that.
29. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino — Wait, shit, now I think I'm back to not understanding Calvino again. I mean, I think I got at least part of this book intellectually, but emotionally it did nothing for me. The language was at times beautiful and clever and compelling, but mostly I was sitting here thinking, “And...?” or, like, waiting for Marco Polo and Kublai Khan to make out or something. Can someone who was affected positively by this book tell me why it worked for them?
30. Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, Justin Taylor — More short stories, of varying quality, and with many wandering into the dime a dozen, disaffected young hipster side of things. Yawn. But a couple of these were really good. I especially liked the apocalyptic Tetris story. With all the books, and specifically short story collections, that I read, I tend to feel pretty impressed if an author manages to write even one story that sticks with me so favorably. That's how I feel about this Tetris story. And, uh. That's not a sentence I get to write often.
Total Reviews: 30/82
If my occasionally remembering to update this booklog is not enough for you, you can enjoy a daily dose of book nonsense on my work blog! (And if these occasional booklog posts are far more than enough...um. Sorry?)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 09:50 pm (UTC)Mine is glaring at me in a stern fashion. Perhaps I should write some this weekend...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-14 10:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-17 01:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 04:23 am (UTC)mostly I was sitting here thinking, “And...?” or, like, waiting for Marco Polo and Kublai Khan to make out or something.
Is it sad that despite the less than glowing review, I sort of want to read it just because of that?
PS: I'm here via Twitter and fic... Mind if I friend you?