What Are You Reading?

Re-reading Gravity's Rainbow with hopes of writing a script for it.

I may start The Corrections this weekend.

I just finished up A Writer at War, which I covered in Pop Culture weekend and copy-pasted my impressions of below, and am now mulling on what to read next. Perhaps I'll dive into a work of fiction for a change of pace, though I'm considering picking up What We Knew as far as (uplifting!) historical reads go.

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The book compiles the unvarnished notebook and diary writings of Soviet military journalist Vasily Grossmann, who followed the Red Army all the way from the disasters of 1941 to the fall of Berlin in 1945. Grossman would later gain fame as a novelist, and his literary talent is abundantly clear in the quality and passion of his personal writings and his remarkable talent for conjuring evocative images and deeply-felt character studies. Amid all of the chaos, Grossman never abandons his fundamentally humanistic perspective, and superbly captures the absurdity, cruelty and heroism of war.

And though the information itself is of course largely known to me, Grossman's writings on the horrors of Treblinka, Mjandak and on the liberation of the town in which his own mother was killed, with so many others, during the 'Holocaust by bullets', are deeply affecting. Every so often the writers/translators covering the gaps in Grossman's writing can get a touch weasel-wordy, but these are minor quibbles about an excellent and moving work.

I thought The Savage Detectives was okay, but 2666 is spectacular. It's on my list to re-read, except I'm going to read the 5 books in reverse order to see what that brings out. By the time I reached book 5, I was so mentally worn down by book 4 that I think I missed quite a bit. Plus, the surface story in book 5 is so good that it's hard to remember to look for everything else that's going on underneath.

Triplets! Wolf Hall is next on my list as well.

I liked it a lot, although it was slow to start. Interestingly, Tash Aw is the rare male writer whose female characters seemed more-interesting and better fleshed out than his male characters. At least in this book, anyway. 

Also interestingly, that's another thing the two books have in common. It's rare for me to really remember characters from a satire, but there are a few who will stick with me, and they're women.

I finally got around to finishing Night Film.  I can't say I liked it as much as I did Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I actually ended up enjoying it for what it was, outside of a few annoying narrative tics and an apparent inability to write in the voice of guff male.  Pessl ended up sticking the landing pretty well, which was pretty surprising because I started to think she was going to lose control of the story the more it headed down the magic/occult path, but she pulled out of that nose dive and ended with a nice stinger at the end.

I think the book was only disappointing in comparison to Special Topics, but man, I just fell in love with the prose of that book.  Night Film is a pretty solid read.

I just finished House of Leaves (OK, I've yet to read the Appendices, but essentially, I'm finished).  SPOILERS FOLLOW THROUGHOUT.  I was pretty impressed with the ending. I was absolutely expecting Truant to kill someone and end up in some sort of metal hospital/prison, and I was prepared for the worst during that passage where he's about to beat Gdansk man to death, so the actual ending was pleasantly surprising and cathartic.  And the passage where Navidson reads the in-book House of Leaves was brilliant.  

But before that, I was starting to get a little fed up with all the Zampano literary criticism satire stuff, largely because it was such an immensely pretentious way to mock pretension.  I like to think that part of this was deliberate, that Danielewski wrote Zampano as somewhat unnuanced and pretentious, but that made parts of the book a real slog to get through, so even if Danielewski was deliberately presenting Zampano as a flawed writer, he should have done so in a way that didn't make Zampano's endless fake literary review quotes so difficult to get through at times.  Because that also made the second-best part of the story, the actual stuff that goes on in Navidson's house, far more difficult to get through, colder, and more emotionless.  And I think that Danielewski is trying to have it both ways, where he can both mock pretentious academia, but at the same time use the fake analysis in the book to show us how clever he is.  Also, that chapter where Karen is interviewing a bunch of people who mostly actually exist in the real world, I thought it was really weird and of questionable taste for Danielewski to write so many of them as making sexual or pseudo-sexual advances toward Karen during the interview.

And while I'm on the topic of Zampano, and pretentiousness, time for my own pretentious over-analysis of something that's quite possibly pure coincidence.  I thought it was telling that Zampano, who at the level of the story wherein he is writing the book as an analysis of "The Navidson Record" as if it really exists, writes the least-satisfying level of the story, and is also the only one of the three fictional creative minds in the book who doesn't reach some level of cathartic closure with the issues that he grapples with in the story, while Truant and Navidson are able to create something that both addresses some horrible experience or fear (whether of fear death, fear of impending insanity, inability to cope with loss of parents, or whatever) in a way that is ultimately positive and meaningful, and in a way that allows them to personally come to terms with these things.  So yeah, I thought that was cool, and says something about the creative process that's pretty cool, but I'm also not an English major so this is probably not a particularly nuanced analysis on my part.

But yeah, overall I enjoyed House of Leaves.  The multiple levels of frame story was a really cool approach, and there's a ton of other really clever stuff with language, fear of mortality, etc.  I'm not sure if I loved it the way that quite a few members of the commentariat seem to have loved it, but I can understand why people talk about this as being one of their favorite books, and even if I thought it was deeply flawed in some respects, it's so fascinating that it's mostly able to overcome its flaws.

I once heard somebody say that when you read Infinite Jest, for the first 300 pages, you wish it was 300 pages shorter; for the second 300 pages you think it's just right; for the last 300 pages you wish it was 300 pages longer. But then I'm prejudiced; it's probably my second-favorite novel ever behind Brothers Karamazov.

Maybe one day...

Currently reading Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children so far, so good. Creepy pictures.

How is that? I read his Bronze Age trilogy, but was wondering about that series. I know they're loosely connected.

This book was recommended to me about a month ago. I think I am going to give it a try.  Let me know what you think of it when you're done.

I just finished Worlds' End and started in on The Kindly Ones, so I'm in 1993 with you.  Cool flannel.