In the dark

Recently Acquired: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri; Skippy Dies by Paul Murray; Room by Emma Donoghue; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

On the Shelf: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

It’s been a while since I have written here. Mostly, I was just embarrassed because I was reading slowly. Besides stressing about job applications, I forced myself through to the end of Eggers’s How We Are Hungry collection and found a couple stories I was glad to have read. “Quiet” and “Up The Mountain Coming Down Slowly” were both worth the time, but it’s weird because I think I could totally love something else that Dave Eggers wrote. He has this style that is sometimes really enthralling and other time painful. I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him yet.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was a nice romp. It’s comprised of short stories and while they eventually all begin to feel a bit similar to each other, they still kept me reading and happy. It was a bit like finding a good detective TV show and watching a season. Eventually you see the formula, but it’s OK and is still great. Holmes is just a little more literary. Interesting to read these and then watch the british Sherlock show where some of the elements are mentioned but mostly all is new.

I picked up Man in the Dark yesterday and now I’m already two thirds of the way through it. It’s only 180 pages, though. A couple years ago I read The New York Trilogy (or I listened to the audio version, actually) and I was surprised to find that I didn’t like it at all. The first story engaged me and then ended abruptly and I hoped they next two stories would pick it up, but they were just entirely different stories. Anyway, that is all beside the point. I knew from everything I had heard about Auster that I should love his work. It is always described in a way that puts it right up my alley and I’ve been meaning to give him another change. Well I’m glad I did. Man in the Dark is a very strange and fantastic book. It’s about an old man recovering from a car accident. The whole story takes place over one night of insomnia. The man lays awake in bed, inventing a story about another man who is transported to an alternate America whose task is to kill the man in the dark who is inventing the story so that the characters can be freed from the story the man is inventing. It’s all very meta, but Auster pulls it off with impressive ease. It is definitely one of the more engaging and original stories I have read lately.

So that’s it. I’m slowly coming down from my classics and short stories kick to try to read more contemporary work. Not sure what I’ll pick up next.

A Heartbreaking Collection of Uninspiring Stories (and other less-rude comments)

Recently Acquired: Granta #114; The Names by Don Delillo; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

On The Shelf: How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers; 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; Bratsk Station and other new poems by Yevegeny Yevtushenko.

It’s been another interesting week for reading. I have been sticking with the short story theme to break up the endless 1Q84 which has actually gotten a bit more exciting, though still in a plodding way compared to other Murakami books I have read.

After finishing The Nick Adams Stories I suppose the next collection of short stories I read has an unfair disadvantage by not being The Nick Adams Stories. That seems to be the case with How We Are Hungry. I have really mixed feelings about this collection. Sometimes I’m really impressed with the way Eggers handles language, but other times I want to beat my head through reinforced drywall. A lot of what bothers me are the unnecessarily stylized bits that serve no purpose in the stories except to shout, “Hey! I’m writing in a new and interesting way! Hey! Pay attention to me, I’m realy clever.” It feels pretty forced. And also, some of the stories are about two paragraphs and don’t feel nearly finished. Though, to be fair, I’m sure I’m hypersensitive to any sort of extraneous stylization after coming down from reading Hemingway. And a quick pop on over to Goodreads has convinced me that How We Are Hungry is not Eggers’s best work so I won’t write him off just yet.

On a completely different topic, I began reading Bratsk Station, which has been been sitting on my shelf for about a year. As a reader, I feel like I’m always tiptoeing around poetry. I’ve been reading a bit of it lately, and while I appreciate the use of language, I’m never sure that I actually get what the poetry is about. Yevtushenko is one of the few exceptions. I’ve always had a soft spot for Russian writers and I suppose poetry is no exception. It begins, “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.” That’s an interesting way to begin a collection of poems. What I really appreciate is that Yevtushenko’s poems often read like stories, and they always ring so true on a level even beyond history. You really get the feeling of what it was like to be an artist in the Soviet Union. Very intriguing.

Meanwhile, I picked up a few interesting-looking books for my collection at a library book sale in Newport. Granta is such a lovely literary journal, I am looking forward to browsing that. I have been meaning to read some Don Delillo and so I didn’t pass up The Names even though it isn’t one of his wider known books. I’m curious to see what that’s all about.

A short novel in the midst of some heavy hitters.

Recently Acquired: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; East of Eden, by John Steinbeck; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; One Hundred Years of Solitude,  by Gabriel García Márquez.

On My Shelf: Of Mice And Men, by John Steinbeck; 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami; Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, Edited by C. K. Scott Moncrieff; The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway; Tatt av Kvinnen, by Erland Loe (Norwegian).

This week hasn’t been the most productive of reading weeks and part of the reason is just that I have too many books that I want to read that I keep starting new ones. That’s why Of Mice And Men was such a relief because I could read the whole thing in a day and then know I have at least finished one book this week. Overall, I enjoyed the book much more than I probably would have if I had to read it in high school.

1Q84 is still continuing in the same vein as before. I’m around page 400 now and ready for it to kick off into Murakami’s signature mind-blowing amazingness. The prospects don’t look so promising. I’ve heard many mixed reviews of this one and so far it’s not nearly my favorite Murakami. It seems like he had an idea for a short story and stretched it on and on like when space debris approaches a black hole. Spaghettification. Part of the reason for this is that it was originally published in three separate volumes, and my impression so far is that there was no need for this. Just like The Hobbit movies, unnecessary stretching does the story no good.

The Nick Adams Stories have provided some enjoyment these past few days. They are described as being very close to Hemingway’s actual experiences, which maybe explain why he was depressed. Still, reading these makes me want to get out into the woods and fish for trout while drinking stolen brandy and cleaning my rifle. I’m about halfway through this one and I can see how much these stories have influenced future short story writers. “The Killers” is my favorite so far.

Meanwhile, Swann’s Way sits on my shelf gathering dust in a very Proustian way. I keep meaning to pick it up again, but never manage to read more than one or two pages at a time before changing to something else. Maybe I’ll need to wait until I finish the others so I can devote my full attention to this one.

I’m excited about the books I acquired this week. I got them all at the local dump’s free library. They are all books I’ve been meaning to read or, in the case of Brave New World, re-read. East of Eden seems promising and I would love to dive into it as soon as I’m through some of these heftier novels that are on my shelf.

In other news, my own novel is under consideration by an agent in New York who requested the full manuscript this week. I’m trying to keep my excitement under control and not get my hopes too high, but more on that later if anything comes of it.

Snowstorm.

Here I am in the midst of the snowstorm. The one everyone’s calling Nemo. I spent the first half of the day plowing the driveway with the snowblower and the other half plowing headlong into Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. So far I don’t know what to think. It’s interesting, but I keep thinking it could be so much shorter without losing content. I’m about one third of the way through.

In case you’re wondering why there’s a picture of me, perhaps you haven’t read the tiny print under the name of the blog. Self portraiture is more for my sanity than my vanity. Oof. Sorry, that was bad.

It’s a Start

Recently Acquired: 15 American One-Act Plays, Edited by Paul Kozelka; A Pocket Book of Modern Verse, Edited by Oscar Williams.

On my shelf: Cathedral, by Raymond Carver; Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, Edited by C. K. Scott Moncrieff; The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway; Tatt av Kvinnen, by Erland Loe (Norwegian)

One day at the book store I happened upon a collection of essays by novelist Nick Hornby about the books he had acquired and read during each month. It was entertaining and lively enough to inspire me to copy the idea.

Today I finished up reading Cathedral. It was a really satisfying experience because the title story “Cathedral” is the first story I ever read by Carver way back at the university, and now after having read two of his collections, I end on the same story I started at with a new set of eyes. Highly recommended.

Now let’s talk about Proust. I am a solid 80 pages into Swann’s Way and am still struggling to find some sort of thread that will carry me through the rest of the volume. I’ve even Googled “how to read Proust properly” and the most prominent tip I found was “quickly” which seems entirely counter-intuitive. The density of the prose is precisely why I digressed to reading short stories, and now that I have finished the collection is only fair that I give Swann another chance.

On the topic of short stories, I have grown rather fond of those often overlooked ugly brothers of novels. They tend to be too long to read in one sitting (I get distracted easily) and too short to really get sucked into. However, one of my favorite reads of 2012 was a collection of short stories by Tamas Dobozy titled Siege 13 which opened my eyes to the power of a well crafted short story, especially in the context of a well crafted collection. I’m finding Hemingway’s often-praised Nick Adams stories a little harder to delve into. I always forget that I need to mentally switch gears in my head to read Hemingway. I just don’t know any other way to explain it. Will keep at it.

Finally, there’s the odd duck of the bunch: Erland Loe’s Tatt av Kvinnen which made quite a splash when it came out in Norway and was quickly adapted to film. For me, I chose it for the naive prose style and ease of language that at my level I can manage to read at a snail’s pace. More like Norwegian language studies than pleasure reading, but so far it has been totally worthwhile. If you can read in a second language, I highly recommend reading books for practice. I can’t tell you how disappointed I’d be if I woke up one day and found I had forgotten my Norwegian, but that stuff happens, man.