The List: Reading July through September 2016

Maria Friberg, Still Lives #3

Surrounded by good books this summer, I nevertheless read less than usual. At times I felt guilty for letting so much worthwhile literature sit unregarded while I absorbed myself in other concerns (time-sensitive and fairly important though they were). There was a two-week stretch during which I only worked out once and didn't leave the housing unit for a single rec period — a pretty good indicator of my monomaniacal drive. But dammit, I got done what I set out to do.

As they so often do, my dear Mum, the good Lady Val, and Prospero's Tom Wayne collectively sent more books than my busyness allowed me to read before this quarter was up. I did my level best. Two still sit on my shelf as I type this. There's a temptation to take one up right now, but with the completion of my latest big project (HTML-related — don't even ask) I've felt the return of my muse and have been daily progressing on my long-unfinished novel, ignored these many months. The fiction on my shelf can wait a little longer.

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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
The way it crackles with possibilities and breathes with Egan's multifarious, lifelike prose, I hardly wonder why A Visit from the Goon Squad won so many prestigious awards (National Book Critics Circle, New York Times Book Review Best Book, the Pulitzer). She created a veritable solar system when she wrote this novel, an intricate series of orbits — some closer, some farther distant — with her character Bennie Salazar in the role of its sun. Bennie's rise and fall and resurrection in the music business is the novel's ostensible plot. Leaping, skipping, shuffling, and spinning around years and continents, the book's numerous voices resolve themselves into a chorus by tantalizing degrees as their interconnectedness dawns on us, a brilliant and subtle affirmation of life's ephemerality and infinite potential.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
His luminous language always delighted me before, and this, Rushdie's second novel, from 1981, proves to be no exception. It won the Booker Prize then, and got voted "Best of the Booker" in 2008, probably because it's practically the Platonic ideal of a novel.

The story of Saleem Sinai, a "nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk's tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated […] grotesque creature," whose destiny and India's tragicomically mirror one another bore some superficial similarities, in its telling, to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. It's not derivative, though. Not by a long shot. And the only thing about reading Midnight's Children that I didn't like was the impossibility of ever reading it again for the first time.

César Aira (Katherine Silver, translator), Dinner
Twee turns sensational, then ruminative, in this novella by the prolific Argentinian, which landed flat, for me, after a perfectly nice setup: an aging bachelor and his mother, just back from dinner with a rich friend, return home and see live television footage of risen corpses slurping the brains of panicking townsfolk.

"Was it a nightmare, the result of a bad case of indigestion, poor television programming, or did something truly scary happen in Pringles that evening after dinner?" asks the back-cover copy. Thus the story plays fast and loose with certainties, dreamlike, in the manner of David Lynch films or Jesse Ball novels, only without those works' usual credulous perspective. Midway through Dinner, narration switches to an omniscient voice implying that what we're reading is only a dream, which robs everything that follows of any consequence (as well as my interest).

Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World: And Other Stories
Many short-fiction collections start strong as hell, then rapidly devolve into mediocrity…or worse. Not so, this one. The first story here risked losing my interest from the get-go. It took me two more before The Unfinished World, Sparks's genre-agnostic second published book, offered anything memorable.

By the collection's end, I understood why. Despite her often-ingenious premises — space-station janitors, Arthurian heroes resurrected to aid treasure-seekers, unrequited love between famous Victorian naturalists, an Eternal Library that physically houses abstract concepts — Sparks shines when her tales have room to spread out and develop those ideas' potential. She's competent at short-shorts and flash fiction, but since when does "competent" stir readers? The longer stories here, particularly the novella that lends the collection its title, are engaging, darkly beautiful pieces that lift The Unfinished World to another plane altogether.

Jon Duckett, HTML & CSS
Being locked away and denied computer use for an indefinite period hasn't dampened my interest in all things webby. CSS had yet to be widely adopted by web developers in 2001, when Missouri took me captive. XML was just coming into use. Flash held boundless promise. People still liked RealPlayer.

My, times have changed.

Once I got past the remedial opening chapters (this colorful book being an extremely beginner-friendly how-to), I had quite a few fun aha moments, taking me back to an uber-geeky past life when I could roll around in code for hours on end and not realize five minutes had passed. Nostalgia meets enrichment — it doesn't get much better than that.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Like Orwell's 1984, this novel deserves several readings per lifetime. (Both are on my list of forty favorite fiction works.) Vonnegut was a satirist nonpariel, and Slaughterhouse-Five is a fine reminder of how effectively humor communicates ghastly truths. His life's work consisted of fourteen novels, several story collections and plays, and some nonfiction, and although he was old when he died, in 2007, it seems like there should've been so much more.

So it goes.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Wait, a novel? More like a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale, then back again. The connective tissue of these nested narratives is the lives of the souls the book follows, the echoes and repeating motifs occurring from one incarnation to the next. Mitchell does the voices and cleverly frames them so well, the recurrances strike the reader like lightning even though they're written as mere dejá vù.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Joan M. Burnham, translator), Letters to a Young Poet
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke's six-year correspondence with an admiring unknown sparkles with wisdom and friendly tokens of affection, and it's so rewarding to read. I hesitate to say more. In his inaugural letter to his young acolyte, Rilke cautioned:

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no words has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

These letters have long outlived their sender, their recipient. They endure for precisely the reasons art does, because they are art.

Robert Kirkman, et al., Outcast by Kirkman & Azaceta, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him
Highbrow to low-, my reading habits surprise even me at times. This comic was loaned to me, but don't be misled: I'm a true-blue comic-book geek from way back. Funnily enough, the last comic that I read was also borrowed from another prisoner, and it, too, was written by Robert Kirkman.

COO of Image Comics (Marvel and DC's only serious competition), and creator of, basically, every human being's favorite TV series, The Walking Dead, Kirkman's kind of a hot commodity at the moment. Until my friend Zach told me about Outcast, though, I was oblivious to its existence. (My subscription to Wizard lapsed a while back. I don't know if Comic Shop News even survived the '90s. I'm out of touch.) It's cool stuff.

The comic's laconic bits-and-pieces disclosure style would be familiar to Walking Dead fans. The similarities end there. Outcast is supernatural horror — The Exorcist meets Constantine. For all the demonic possessions, you'd expect more action, and my take is that twenty-two pages (the standard length of contemporary comics) is nowhere near enough for this story to gather its momentum. If I had picked issue #1 off the rack and perused it, I'd have left the shop with a back issue of Spawn instead.

The thing is, fans collect issues and read trade paperbacks like this volume, which collects the first six issues. Before I reached the end of Vol. 1, the only quibble I had was not being able to stroll over to Clint's Books & Comics, my old fanboy haunt, and buy Vol. 2.

A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
During an appearance on The Colbert Report, Professor Grayling described his impetus for "making" this book, a distillation of hundreds of distinct philosophical works, as being a desire to see a single-volume secular guide to living a good, meaningful life. The Christians have their Bible, the Muslims have their Koran, the Hare Krishnas have their Bhagavadgita, and so on, so why shouldn't humanists have our own collection of parables, proverbs, histories, and general wisdom, just without all that supernatural stuff? Grayling acknowledged how ambitious, even arrogant, the idea sounds, and confessed that the end result falls well short of perfection, but it's nevertheless an impressive undertaking and an inspiring text to absorb. Who knows, maybe a couple of thousand years' edits, additions, and redactions at the hands of others will render The Good Book a monument of human brilliance, industry, and loving kinship. We have to start somewhere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy, editors), The Blithedale Romance: A Norton Critical Edition)
Most high-school English classes have Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter on their reading lists. I dropped out of Lincoln College Prep before any introduction to the harrowing ordeal of Hester Prynne, and didn't get around to Hawthorne until last month. In keeping with my curious tendency to not begin with authors' better-known work, The Blithedale Romance is probably his most critically derided novels (one of his peers called it "the slightest and most colourless" of Hawthorne's novels). You might ask why I do this to myself; I might be at a loss to answer.

The Blithedale Romance is, for sure, a mess, heavy on overwrought Gothic trappings and! until a totally uncalled-for death scene near the end, light on action I've heard that Hawthorne wasn't the best at structuring his plots. No one warned me, however, that I risked physical injury by reading this book. Again and again I tipped bodily forward, nearly hurling myself off my bunk, dozing. Lying down to read was safer. It was also the reason I took weeks to read this book. Being horizontal only made me fall asleep faster.

The List: Reading October Through December 2014

Bob Lescaux, Writing

Every so often I stumble into an existential conundrum as a writer. More texts exist than there is time enough in even several lifetimes to read, with more disseminated daily. And that’s just books. Look at the whole textual output of the human race — from the lowliest Justin Bieber fan site to the most well-reasoned, erudite wiki — you might have to ask yourself why anyone in his right mind would willingly drag his sorry ass into the fray by proclaiming himself a writer. It’s a losing proposition. The odds against even minimal success are staggering. Writing doesn’t guarantee publication, publication doesn’t guarantee readers, readers don’t guarantee success, success doesn’t guarantee relevance, relevance doesn’t guarantee a literary legacy. The writer at the table next to you at Starbucks? You‘ll never read his stuff. If you do, it probably says more about your reading habits than about his talent.

So why write? Why fill up page after page with these little squiggly characters, deluded into thinking (for whatever reason) that my particular arrangements of them is special, meriting any attention at all when there’s so much on TV? Why even dream that my abilities to string sentences together into coherent ideas are greater than, or even equal to, those of the millions of others who’ve already done so? What hubris! And then I go and pick up a book that really wows me, and still I have the gall to go on calling myself a writer, thinking that I actually have what it takes to make from this delusion a life.

Some days I feel bad for myself, toiling away like I do, like Sisyphus with his rock. Once in a while I’ll even grow discouraged and, in a masochistic fit, will pick up a good book to read. These past three months have been rough for me, creatively speaking, and I haven’t even read as much as usual. These two facts could, of course, be interconnected. Maybe my creative drive is directly proportionate to the degree of futility I perceive in my labors. Seeing the stone roll down the hill for the umpteenth time, Sisyphus is emboldened and says, “All right, this time I’m gonna get this bastard to the top.” Actually, that could make a pretty great story….

For your outstanding generosity with printed matter this quarter, thank you, Caleb, John A., Jersey, Kat (many times over), Mum, and Tom at Prospero’s Books. The six of you have helped stoke my fire. I’m warmed.

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James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
Does getting older change a person’s language patterns? How do men and women differ in their word usage? What linguistic quirks signify an individual’s social status within a given group? In what ways are thinking styles revealed by word choices? These were my questions. I wanted answers. Although I’m told that I have a keen ear for dialog, the further along I progress with my novel’s loose arc, the less certain I am that its multiple narrative voices are as distinct as they ought to be. The Secret Life of Pronouns helped, surprised, and sometimes reassured me. (Word nerds, for a good time, visit the author’s website.) I picked it up thinking I’d just skim, picking specific nuts and bolts to help me tweak my prose; I ended up scouring Pennebaker’s entire tool shed.

Robert Kirkman, et al., The Walking Dead, Book One
The AMC series was days away from starting its fourth season and the Image Comics had already reached their milestone hundredth issue, so it’s safe to say that I was a little late to the party. This hard cover compendium (containing the first two trade paperbacks, Days Gone Bye and Miles Behind Us) was a loan from a neighbor who learned about my own zombie novel and Walking Dead fandom while we were standing around, waiting to use a telephone. How cool to finally learn what the fuss was about!

I like Tony Moore’s clean, expressive art in Chapter One better than Charlie Adlard’s more muddled work in Chapter Two, but Kirkman’s writing and plot development definitely flourish in the latter. Differences in the story lines of show and comic are interesting, including the unfamiliar characters (Chris, Allen, and the twins haven’t appeared in the show), strange relationships (Dale and Andrea having sex!?), and a more natural passage of time (the group’s first winter was glossed over in the show; in the comics, it’s clearly a hard one). The upshot of all this is that I may now be the only person whose Amazon wish list includes a Babylonian epic, the poems of Wallace Stevens, and a graphic novel about people fleeing reanimated corpses.

Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
The history of the nautical chronometer and how its invention came to revolutionize global navigation wouldn’t necessarily interest everyone, but the surprise gift of this book revealed to me a subject that’s actually quite fascinating. If Sobel’s very condensed account of John Harrison’s mechanical innovation were much longer, it might only appeal to scholars and watchmakers. As it is, Longitude constitutes a sort of historical amuse bouche that finishes moist and savory.

Naoki Higashida (K.A. Yoshida and David Mitchell, translators), The Reason I Jump
Using an alphabet grid drawn on a card and laminated, the thirteen-year-old author pointed to each letter of every word of this book about living with autism in a neurotypical world. While many find the young man’s observations intriguing, I was more compelled to read The Reason I Jump because of how its text was composed, which is similar to the technique used by Jean-Dominique Bauby when he wrote his extraordinary memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about his “locked-in syndrome.” The Reason I Jump may not be a literary masterpiece, but it is a major personal achievement for a boy trying to make himself understood in a world that itself defies understanding.

Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Blindness by Giovani Pontiero, 1984 by George Orwell — I love literary novels set in not-so-distant futures, which explore large moral or social issues through whatever central conceit they introduce. I expected On Such a Full Sea to be more than it is, based on when and where it’s situated. Lee is an adept prose stylist, and his tale does offer moments of quiet profundity, but these points only make me more disappointed that the novel falls short of being stunning. I blame its distant narration (by a collective “we”) and its nearly mute protagonist, a stoic young woman, which never allow the book to feel greater than its one-thing-after another parts.

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Voices from the graves of citizens of a fictional Midwestern town comprise this collection of more than 200 free-verse poems. Theirs are mostly hard lives — of politicians, pastors, housewives, drunkards, soldiers, newspaper men, lovers. Their epitaphs are brief, affectingly told. Did Masters get his inspiration from strolling through an Illinois graveyard? I can’t imagine the lives of Spoon River arising from any other source. I love that this book came to me in the midst of my own project involving a motley chorus of characters.

Italo Calvino (William Weaver, translator), If on a winter’s night a traveler
Certain poems are nothing but beginnings, I once read. But what about works of prose? Can a book of fiction, say, be coherent and effective if it’s made up of only introductions, intimations, premonitions, the setting of scenes, promises never to be fulfilled? Calvino, the Italian fabulist, with this novel from 1979, proved that it can. Difficult as it is to summarize what is essentially the beginnings of ten related but disparate novels, I guess I can say that it’s a love story, not necessarily involving people (although, that’s also an element) as much as the love of literature, and the many forms that love can take. If on a winter’s night a traveler is a hall of mirrors, a labyrinth, a bewildering chase, and a cri de cœur for us to think of reading as a sensual delight.

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
A mid-’90s reinvention of the Pygmalion myth (the tale of the Greek king whose prayer to Aphrodite brought the very literal object of his affection, an ivory statue of a woman, to life), involving a cognitive neuroscientist, a computer-based neural network, and a novelist who just happens to be named Richard Powers. The story follows a straight enough line to its obvious end, even with the apparent digressions into the novelist’s failed relationship with a former student. What brings it to life is the dexterous prose Powers employs, adventurously and with confidence, while exposing the message at the novel’s core: that life may be nasty, brutish, and short, but through our never-ending striving, willful questing, and following of sometimes quixotic whims we make it also something exquisite.

Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
Music appreciation, religious ecstasy, schizophrenic hallucination, drug abuse, evolutionary biology, and other related matters. Flaherty has written a neuroscience text that addresses questions on the minds of so many writers, which she herself agonized over after experiencing bouts of hypergraphia (compulsive writing) and creative block. It’s a scientific perspective on the humanities — nothing I’d encountered before.

The Midnight Disease takes its fitting title from Edgar Allan Poe, who coined the term to describe his own insatiable writerly urges. The book explores numerous creative phenomena and their origins within the brain, quite a few of which are fascinating. For instance, I learned that poets are basically self-medicating when they compose elegies, since all acts of bereavement trigger the release of endogenous opiates in our gray matter. Also, I was surprised to find out that two destinct parts of the brain control language production and language reception — Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, respectively — and that damage to one or the other impacts very different aspects of one’s communication, not in the way you’d probably expect.

If this sort of thing sounds over-technical or tedious, I’m willing to bet that you’re not a writer. To me, though, who gets succor and challenge, frustration and fulfillment in striving to make literature, this new way of thinking about the inner workings of mind and brain in the process of creation is the bee’s knees. I recommend The Midnight Disease for anyone existentially driven to write or who suffers occasional run-ins with block.