I read:
Thoughts:
The Last Days of MankindThe Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus: Reviewed here. There are sudden surprise aliens at the end, so beware.
Bone Gap by Laura Ruby: Much like the aliens of The Last Days of Mankind, sudden surprise magic! Sigh.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: Not much happens in this book. Or at lot happens. It’s one of those.
A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa: Reviewed .
Submission by Michel Houellebecq: See that, right there: I think this is the first time I’ve ever spelled Houellebecq correctly on my first try!
Geoff: Would I like this?
Me: What, Houellebecq? No.
Geoff: Why not?
Me: Take all the nastiness and not nice parts of me, then stretch it out and multiply it enough until it’s one person. That person writes a book. That book is Houellebecq.
Ruby Redfort blah blah blah by Lauren Child: So, this book takes pretty much all the non-misogynistic stuff I hate in kids’ books and puts it all there: genius kid who doesn’t have to try and is a smart-alecky smart-ass to all the adults around her. Don’t listen to her kids — you have to work hard and not just coast along on your brilliance! You’re not just good at stuff, you work to get good at stuff.
I really liked Child’s Clarice Bean books, so I feel put-out that this book was so almost-everything-I-hate.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 edited by Sid Holt: Reviewed here.
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville: Reviewed here. Plus, my review prompted Geoff to pick up The City and The City, so now he can tell me whether to read longer-form Miéville or not. Super! He is like my reading guinea pig.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman: I liked it more than I remembered. Didn’t make me a Neil Gaiman drooler-over though. I’m still skeptical.
The Vatican Cellars by André Gide: Reviewed here.
Crackpot by Adele Wiseman: In the 1970s, the Can-lit industry, to stretch out those government grants as far as they could, printed everything in tiny font to ensure that they could make as many copies of the books as possible, flood the market, and have their books purchased by sheer-wearing-down of the populace since no matter where they looked, Can-con books abounded. At least, I assume this is why my library copy of Crackpot from 1974 is printed in nine point font. Why would you take such a good book and put it in such a small font? This is the Can-lit they should make you read in high school (in a larger font though), but they never will, because of all the sex. On the off-chance that you are a Canadian high school student, go find yourself a copy!
Favourite book:
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion: I don’t know why I waited so long to read this book. I really liked it. I want my own copy, but I want my own copy as a beat up, second hand one, with creased pages and suspicious stains (but no writing in the margins; I don’t care what other people thought enough to write down). If you find one at a yard sale or a skeezy used bookstore, get it for me so it can be mine.
Most promising book put on wishlist:
People, in terms of strangers on the internet writing articles at large, not, you know, actually talking to me, keep telling me to read this book.
I watched:
Thoughts:
The Mindy Project: Oh I am sad. I am so sad. I know it is only a sitcom, but everything, oh, the truth, it makes me sad.
Inside Out: Also sad. I cried, pretty much nonstop, through the whole movie, until I gave myself a migraine.
I wrote: Not much. But I decided that much like how a middle third Cantor set has measure zero, but if you add two middle third Cantor sets together, one gets a set of measure two, I will just start randomly squishing some of my story ideas together so that they become not a set of measure zero, but a set of measure two.
So this is what I’ll do.
You know that monster, No Face from Spirited Away, who gets bigger and bigger and stuffs everything into his mouth? I feel sometimes like I am like that with books. I say to myself No more books right now meghan and then promptly go to the bookstore with Geoff and Tesfa and buy another book.
One of my sisters buys me books, yay! My mother-in-law buys me books too. Other people don’t facilitate my addiction. But, people can… see… I added my book wishlist up there. Actually, it isn’t so much a wishlist as a list of any book that I’ve probably encountered anywhere and thought Hey, maybe I should read that.
There are days when I think a wishlist of 1200 books is probably a bit excessive. What would happen if I simply deleted all of those books?.
But then I do nothing and the list gets longer and longer and longer and longer.
I need more time to read books.
Start the month with a hundred year old Austrian satire, end the month with a hundred year old French satire. Why not?
Not that I was really aware this was a satire before the opening page (The Vatican Cellars: An allegorical satire) told me. I ARC’d The Vatican Cellars because I read La Symphonie pastorale in high school, which is a story pretty much perpendicular to this one. I don’t recall La Symphonie pastorale as a romp. The Vatican Cellars is a romp. The satire here is definitely more subtle than in this month’s earlier Austrian satire (i.e. no Martians sweeping in at the end and blowing up the earth). I appreciated that, having the author think me a little bit clever. But I likely missed a lot of the Catholic jokes and I know I missed pretty much all the Freemason ones.
So we have our romp. There’s a whole intermingled family (three sisters, their husbands, an illegitimate child, the childhood friend of the illegitimate child, the girlfriend of the illegitimate child and his childhood friend (generally not at the same time, but maybe?), the sister of one of the husbands, the father of same husband, a childhood friend of another husband (who is in love with the sister his childhood friend married), a bunch of the kids of various sisters and husbands); part way through I felt like I needed one of those family trees found in the front of heavy Russian novels. Then I sorted myself out and continued. The main narrative thrust, at least the one that gets most of the family from France to Italy, is a sort of 419/Nigerian-Prince scam, where you roll your eyes at the characters who can’t seem to see how ridiculous the whole thing is, en courant comme des canards sans tête. There’s the proto-nihilism and a crime that one could attribute, retroactively, to Mersault. There’s a bunch of pious characters ignoring taboos (extra-marital affairs! incest! blasphemy!). There’s a dragging of the last twenty pages or so as some of the machinations are revealed to some of the characters and then …
And then the story simply stops. Bam. Like a wall and we’re in the endnotes and afterword.
Um, okay.
The afterward tries to suggest that the abruptness is again a manner of playing with preconceptions, i.e. where is the happy ending, or the comeuppance or the return to moral rectitude? Nowhere! Because I, André Gide, am trying to fuck with your idea of how stories like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Ha?
So the book was funny and engaging and then it started to slog and then it finished. The End.
But I will mention that The Vatican Cellars is not at all like La Symphonie pastorale, which is more what I was expecting because I never read the blurbs on Netgalley maybe as closely as I should have?
See the kind of wacky verb-tenses in that past sentence? There’s a lot of verb-tense changes The Vatican Cellars. I suppose they are from the original text and not the translation, but they pull me out of the story. Also the narrator who likes to talk to the reader now and then, I think to remind us that André Gide is somewhere watching us. Then the translation, which the introduction assures me has been modernized for today’s reader, veers between describing something as looking gross (at least it wasn’t gnarly) then using words like bumf, which is apparently British slang, no idea if that’s contemporary or not. I’m glad my kobo has a dictionary for me to look these words up in. Ending a review like this, without any real sort of conclusion may seem a bit odd, but think of it this way, I am trying to fuck with your idea of how reviews like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Ha?
The Vatican Cellars, by André Gide, a new translation by Julian Evans, went on sale August 11, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
His devotees with devour it.
Will they? I have no idea. I don’t know any devotees of China Miéville and this is the first book of his I have read.
But yay, smart science fiction. Actually, maybe this isn’t science fiction. Maybe it’s speculative fiction. I’m not really clear on the distinction (is there a difference? is it just semantics? I feel that Miéville, as a Phd Marxist would probably love to argue semantics regarding categorization of his work). But it’s smart and speculative and I like both those things and always always always struggle to find sci-fi/speculative/fantasy works that are both.
So Three Moments of an Explosion comprises of short stories of people reacting to phenomena, with no explanation of the provenance of said phenomena. Just reactions. And some very very short pieces, no more than a page, that function more like ideas for a longer story than a story in-and-of-themselves. Again, with the want of explanations as to why oil rigs have come alive and started walking onto land or why one would parade through London with a pig’s head covering one’s own or why the poena cullei won’t let them alone, the whole collection is unsatisfying. The stories are intelligent; maybe explaining more would dull them right up, but after a while, the stories all blend together because when something odd happens, people will react to it. Or people die weirdly, non-dying people react to it. Or people find something bizarre, then they react to it. Again and again, like thirty times, or however many stories there are, worth. Perhaps all these abnormal things are really manifestations from the same root, and all these stories are connected, which is why, now, they blend together in my memory. That, or they simply aren’t articulated enough to differentiate between, no matter how high of an IQ the stories might themselves have.
So, in the end, I can’t say I devoured the book. I’m not a devotee though. I’d read some of his longer works though, to see if the smarts of Miéville’s ideas can hold up to more lengthy-plot scrutiny. I have a copy of The City and The City I got at a book swap. Maybe I’ll try that next.
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville went on sale August 4, 2015.
I received a copy free from Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.
Congratulations! say the instructions to my new booklight, as if my ability to pick out a booklight at Costco merits positive reinforcement.
Congratulations!
Thank you instructions to an inanimate object. Thanks.
I am not predisposed towards magazines. They have too many advertisements and those that don’t, like Bitch and Adbusters and The Walrus, I let my subscriptions lapse with a stack of issues I never even got around to starting. I cherry pick my way through The Economist most weeks, half-finishing articles and sections. I’ve never read every article in their China section. I don’t think I’ve read their Obits in ages. So even the magazine I “read”, I don’t really read. Something about magazines and their stories just doesn’t gel with me.
But, break outside your comfort zone and all that. A Best-Of Collection means I won’t have to be wading through the trash, thought I. It’s curated, to use web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now? n.0?) lingo. Such a collection will inspire me to explore more long-form journalism. My horizons will be expanded and I will be all the richer.
Except, well, not really.
There’s nothing wrong with any of the stories in The Best American Magazine Writing 2015. They aren’t riddled with typographical errors or unsubstantiated claims. They aren’t unnecessarily fanciful or overwhelmingly dour. They are perfectly adequate technique pieces. I could imagine journalism students dissecting them in little work groups and giving powerpoint presentations afterwards.
But I can’t say that, with the exception of Brian Phillips’ The Sea of Crises, about Sumo wrestling and Yukio Mishima, that I enjoyed reading any of these articles. That I felt that feeling you get after reading something that knocks your mind into the next level, like an energized electron. Most of the time, I just felt annoyed. Or forgetful. Three times now I’ve looked at the table of contents, baffled by Love and Ruin. Three times I couldn’t remember what that piece was about, including about half an hour after I read it. I think I’ve finally got it down though. Love and Ruin is about Afghanistan.
But annoyed. For example, the initial essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. I found the argument muddled and unconvincing even though I am pretty much for reparations (or at least, as the article points out, I am completely open to studying the possibility of reparations via studies that are continually voted down by congress or the senate or whatever it is in the US that vote on these sorts of things. I’m Canadian so that whole governmental process is somewhat mysterious to me). The winning essay didn’t convince someone who already believed in the possibility. Things like this annoy me. The articles instantly stopping when, I guess, they’ve gotten to five thousand or seventy-five hundred or whatever their word limit is, rather than letting the piece be as long as it needs to be, annoyed me. Having to read three short articles on art criticism, written for other art critics, so me having really no clue what was being talked about, annoyed me. Having to read four hundred pages on my iPad rather than my kobo and getting eye strain and headaches annoyed me (although, that really isn’t the fault of the essays in this book, more the publisher. I hate reading on my iPad).
So The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 did not change my opinion of long-form magazine journalism. I’m just going to go back to flipping at random through The Economist‘s articles on the bathroom floor while waiting for Tesfa to get out of the tub. Maybe, when I stupidly request to review The Best American Magazine Writing 2016 next fall, that will be the collection that inspires me to love this type of journalism.
But probably not.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, Sid Holt editor went on sale December 15, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I always find it harder to write reviews for good books than for poor ones (perhaps I should really say books I enjoyed versus books I disliked since no one has, of yet, made me the supreme arbiter of what constitutes a good book. Perhaps that email mistakenly got routed to my spam folder? Feel free to send it to me again universe.) A bad book I can pick apart and be sarcastic about. A good book, what is there to say except I have read a good book?
So I have read a good book.
In A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese transplant to Angola builds a wall separating her apartment from the rest of the building during the Angolan war for independence. She stays there for thirty or forty years later until everything in the story comes together, a bit like in the most absurd of French movie farces, but more like in the tiny patterns of a pysanka, all small and perfect and fit together just so.
Okay, I went away and looked at buzzfeed for fifteen minutes. I’m back. This is what I mean, what am I supposed to say about a good book other than it’s a good book? I read it in an evening. It isn’t heavy or long. It’s like bubbles of air. It’s like reading Gabriel García Márquez — I wrote that in the margins, then saw that other reviews said that too — but other reviews also talk about magical realism and I guess I don’t know what that means because unlike in Gabriel García Márquez, there are no shrinking women or marveling at ice or ascending into the heavens. There are coincidences. There is that farce in the denouement. Like with Gabriel García Márquez, one needs to suspend disbelief, but A General Theory of Oblivion is so deftly drawn that suspending one’s disbelief is a pleasure rather than a chore, like with Gabriel García Márquez. Is that what magical realism is: an enjoyable suspension of disbelief?
I liked A General Theory of Oblivion. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t put the book down once from the first page to the last, so what I will say is what I have said: I have read a good book.
A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa went on sale December 15, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I’m thinking about that.
I’m taking my reading-month early. I started two days ago. Basically a month where I don’t write and it is usually January. Usually I fail and by January 12th, I am scraping the ideas out of my brain in heavy chunks, writing as fast as my fingers will let me.
But I don’t know if it’s going to be like that this time.
I just changed the title. It used to say What should I write? Now it is changed to should.
I mean, obviously, of course I should. But writing isn’t bringing me the relief it did for a while. Lately it feels untenable. I feel like I’m getting to be a better writer as the market for writing like mine shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. The nice rejections I get (some of the strongest writing we’ve seen) get tempered with the smack of reality (but, unfortunately, such writing doesn’t sell).
I can’t give up writing. But I don’t know if I can keep it as my focus when I don’t think I am getting out of it all that I put into it. It’s a drain right now. Maybe I’m coming to the harsh realization that no matter how much I love novels, I don’t know how to write one. Maybe I’m coming to the realization that being thirty-five and unsuccessful at all the jobs I’ve tried so far means I need to get serious about life. Maybe it’s just the fact that it was dark at four-forty-five today. Maybe The Mindy Project was just too sad this week and my mind too suggestible and now I am sad and wondering and thinking that maybe I made a mistake simply because Mindy Lahiri is thinking that.
What will this month bring? Tesfa, who loves jokes right now, would say Christmas! So this month will bring Christmas. And probably a bunch of book reviews as I try to catch up on some ARCs.
I am going to assume that Didion has three syllables.
Lying in bed and
reading Joan Didion books
I thus fell asleep.