From here on out, you can check this blog at it's new home: http://perpetualshotgun.blogspot.com/

I'm going to review "A Handful of Dust" and "Decline and Fall" together because while I enjoyed them both, I finished neither.  Evelyn Waugh is fast becoming one of my literary heroes.  Perhaps "hero" is the wrong word.  If you look back to my review earlier of "Brideshead Revisited," you'll probably pick up on the same joys and disappointments that I'm sharing here.  Waugh is one of those authors who can get me dog-earing every other page as I gleefully break into hysterics and descend into the strange worlds he creates.  A professor of mine once told me that every book is only as good as the world it creates.  She was speaking of Young Adult fiction specifically at the time, but in many ways I think it applies to all literature.  Harry Potter IS amazing because Hogwarts is so well-drawn, but Saul Bellow's Manhattan is a completely different (though equally well-drawn) place to... I don't know, how about Salinger's (since we're coming up on two from him).  Even if they're writing about real places, a writer creates his own world, that couldn't be inhabited directly by some other author's characters. 

Anyway, to get back to the point, Waugh's England is unlike any other that I've seen.  He satirizes academia in "Decline and Fall" better than anything I've seen since "Straight Man" by Richard Russo.  As a teacher, I found his tales of getting up in front of a class full of rude boys, not knowing what to say, and making them write essays sheerly for length, regardless of content... well let's just say it was very familiar, in a good way.  "A Handful of Dust" is about a bored, married couple in the country that gets split up by a equally bored city boy who begins running around with the other man's wife.  This seems to be simply the order of the times, as no one else seems particularly shocked.  Having an affair is a simple fashion statement, to the point that the wife and her friends immediately conspire to sic strange, loose women on her husband, to keep him occupied.  The same as D&F, I loved getting into this world, but at some point I felt stalled.  I won't ruin the surprise, but something terrible happens to the son in the family and it's treated with the same casual dryness that the affair is.  I think, no, I know, that this is intentional - Waugh's real indictment on the society types of England, so removed and dry about everything, even the death of a son.  (There, I ruined it, are you happy?)  I did not get as far into "Decline & Fall" but every chapter seemed more of the same, with no plot in sight, and the hysterical characters muddling along without development. 

So how can I count Waugh as a literary hero?  I suppose because I simply cannot read a sentence of his without being inspired, without breaking into peals of laughter and awe.  This will seem like a terrible, heinous comparison - and I particularly don't like to compare books to films (oh, but I do it anyway - see Naked and the Dead)... but I was watching Wes Anderson's first movie, Bottle Rocket, the other day and it struck me as almost the same.  It's an early effort and I'd always heard it doesn't compare to later treasures like Rushmore and Royal Tennenbaums.  It's true.  The plot is choppy, random, more or less pointless, with a love story that you just can't get into... but nearly every line, almost every scene, is hysterical, unique, and inspiring.  I eject the DVD, I put down the book, and I shake my head that the story didn't ever really get me off the ground, but at the same time, I'll be grinning inwardly, in silent awe, for weeks.

Well, not only has it been a long time since I've last posted, but I've pretty much abandoned all the books that were on my shelf before.  Swiss Family/Treasure Island/Robinson Crusoe were all bought used at the Strand for research for a new writing project, which has since been benched while I rewrite the old project, again.  Augie March I just couldn't get into, Blue Blood seemed interesting but just not enough to warrant it's enormity.  Don Quixote was also enormous and absolutely worth it - but I found that the second hundred pages wasn't all that different from the first hundred and there were still eight hundred more to go.  I think I'll have to wait until I end up in graduate school again.  Or at least on some sort of sabbatical or fellowship or something.

Anywho, I want to do a quick catch-up on the books I did read from the last bookshelf and then I'll put up the handful I  picked up over the holidays.

True Notebooks - Mark Salzman - I had read one of Salzman's other books in high school, Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia.  I remember enjoying it more than most books we read, mostly because it was a true story about a guy who wanted to be a kung fu warrior, smoked a lot of pot, and somehow manages to get into Yale by accident.  Anyway, in True Notebooks, Mark is all grown up, struggling to write a book and winds up teaching writing classes at a local juvenile hall to research for a book.  The experience is sometimes moving, sometimes boring, and I was always suspicious that it was only interesting to me because I write, and teach writing.  One thing I found interesting was that the inmates, who generally didn't finish the ninth grade before murdering someone and getting arrested, wind up writing some beautiful things about their condition.  I used it as an example in my own class that technical skill can only ever take you so far, at the end of the day a writer needs to have something to say.  Ultimately Salzman gets to some interesting questions - what point is there to teaching writing to students who are only going to end up on Death Row? But he never really answers them, aside from saying that he knows it does make a difference somehow.  There is a very tragic moment when he goes to court to hear what one of his best and most gentle students did to get arrested.  It's heartbreaking, but pretty much the climax of the book - after that it seems sort of besides the point that he becomes reinspired to fix his book.

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro - I really enjoyed "Artist of the Floating World" which I read in a graduate class about Apocalyptic Novels, and I remembered liking Remains of the Day in high school.  In particular, I'm always intrigued by how Ishiguro is almost Nabakovian with his unreliable narrators.  This book started out very well - a great setup - an orphaned boy who lived in China is now living in England and working as a detective.  His greatest task is to go back to Shanghai and find out what happened to his parents.  But things get implausible quickly, which made me very sad.  For one, he seems to insist the entire time that his parents must still be alive, still in the same place they were kidnapped to twenty years earlier.  Eventually, when he does unravel the plot, it's bizarre in a way that nothing else in the book has really been up to that point - the ending isn't really satisfying and not only because the shifty narration never quite lived up to its promise from the opening.

Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott - This was recommended to me by an old friend who always wants me to read more science-fiction.  He's a physics/religion major and always finds some truly interesting things to show me and can always explain the latest discoveries and NASA debacles to me.  Anyway, Flatland was very interesting - a square living in Flatland, a world that only exists in the second dimension explains how his world work.  The class stratifications and gender politics alone are fascinating, but then he accidentally goes to Lineland, where he meets points who can only move back and forth in one direction and cannot see him entirely and so don't believe in him.  Then he is visited by a sphere from Spaceland who he cannot fully comprehend, but attempts to.  Interestingly, the Sphere then cannot believe that a fourth-dimensional being could exist and gets angry when the square tries to introduce the possibility.  The whole thing takes a very religious turn at the end, which was clearly building the entire time - where the square is then arrested and imprisoned for preaching nonsense about a third-dimension and thus writes this confession from prison.  It was actually one of the most interesting uses of the confessional form that I've seen in a good while.  I understood most of the math, which is not my area, and it did definitely encourage me to consider higher dimensions and  higher powers, which is what any good confession should do.

So that's that for the old bookshelf.  Here's to the chance I might actually read everything on the  new one!

I’d only ever read bits of “Armies of the Night” by Mr. Mailer – which I didn’t particularly enjoy, except for a bit about him looking at Robert Lowell and realizing that the only character a mediocre writer can’t stare into is the mind of a better writer. So, my expectations for Naked and the Dead were not high, despite it being high on people’s list of greatest novels ever written and higher on lists of greatest war novels ever written. Mailer’s opinion of the book was even lower, according to the forward, where he warns, “Now that fifty years have gone by… I think it might be interesting to talk about it as a best-seller that it was the work of an amateur…. He was naïve, he was passionate about writing, he knew very little about the subtler demands of a good style, he did not have a great deal of restraint, and he burned with excitement as he wrote. He hardly knew whether he should stand in the shadow of Tolstoy or was essentially without talent. He was an amateur.” And he goes on to bash his own book for being a “best-seller”, seemingly pleased with himself for never having produced another one. Well, I ended up loving this book, so I guess passionate amateurish best-sellers win the day. It took me the better part of the summer to read this book, between my constant teaching schedule and the fact that it is 720 pages long. At the same time I was watching HBO’s “Band of Brothers”, which was brilliant and dramatic and violent, but starring a rascally, lovable bunch of soldiers, who occasionally get shot and less often, blown to smithereens. Mailer’s book is just as brilliant, dramatic, and of course, violent but where HBO has well-meaning, starry-eyed patriots, with Mailer we get coarse, sexist, racist, scumbags. Redemption isn’t even on the menu for a few of these roughnecks. They’re as bad as they want to be, in a jungle halfway around the world, marching around with no sense of reason and under constant threat of death. Mailer’s greatest gift isn’t for the descriptions of Anopopei, though those are incredible, or even his pulse-raising plots, but for these exceptionally genuine characters. And in a stroke of experimentalism that seems way ahead of its time, Mailer includes several sections of pure dialogue, written in play format, which lets you see the functioning of these men in a group. Likewise, he writes other interludes in the voices of the various soldiers, about their lives before the war, which lets you literally get into the heads of these tremendous and terrible men. That being said, this virtuoso novel does have its amateurish moments. But they’re not in Mailer’s choice of adjectives or flair for the melodramatic, as he would have you believe from his introduction. They’re in the thinking that led the book to be 720 pages. The descriptors didn’t need to be cut, whole chapters did. Before I hear any cracks about the attention-span of the MTV generation, I have no trouble dedicating myself to the great tomes of literature. Well, Don Quixote isn’t moving closer to the top of the pile, you’re right, but I do believe there are stories that can be engaging for such lengths. This one however, wasn’t always so. I found myself skimming through long sections at a time, mostly the ones that involved the superior officer, as he describes endlessly the process of planning an attack and reflects upon the military. Some of it is great stuff – “man’s greatest urge is omnipotence” – but that’s a diamond in the rough, believe me. Even some of the aforementioned in-character interludes could have been trimmed down. But it remains one of the most impressive books that I’ve read in a good long time. Mailer claims it reeks of amateurism, which may be – but in the end his penchant for verbosity is more than overcome by the refreshing experimental sections, his pitch-perfect ear for the voices of these men, and a obsessive urgency that can only have come from the pressure an event this massive in human history on one of the finest amateurs this country has known in a century.

So the summer job that I warned about has been just as time consuming as I feared.  I have had some time to read, here and there, but what I haven't had time to do is update this website.  So I have a little time this morning and I thought that I would offer some brief remarks on several books on my list I have read but not commented on.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

I ended up enjoying this, but it took me a long time to get into.  Having seen the movie first, it was hard to take the book for the breakthrough it must have been, but by the final fifty pages or so, I was moving along with it well.  While I was reading it, an older writing  tutor that I was working with told me that the main character embodied all the qualities that his generation had sold out in the sixties.  And I got the whole "rebel against the institution" thing and the importance of freedom... but I didn't find McMurphy nearly that heroic.  Which, I think is to Kesey's credit.  We know he may have had a relationship with an underaged girl and his solutions are always self-motivated... I think in the end it was his narcissism that really endeared him to me, but that took most of the book to do.  Parts of the book were very well done, especially some of the Chief's narration when he's off his medication.  It reminds me that I do like some experimental writing, some surreal drug trips... but that maybe those things were edgy in 1962 and now... not so much.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

So this summer job is partly teaching speed-reading techniques to high-schoolers and adults, which I have been skeptical of, overall.  So I decided to read Heart of Darkness with the speed-reading techniques we had been trained in, to get the overall effect.  I sat down in Riverside Park with the book a few weeks ago and just went to town.  I have to say, I read it in under an hour.  It felt a lot like skimming, but the interesting thing was that I did have at least some temporary hold on the character names, the general structure of the book, and the plot's progression.  When I got to the end I had a hard time really remembering most of the finer points, though.  However, I was surprised to find that I'd still noticed certain phrases and images.  They sort of jumped out at me all at once as I was going along.  I think part of the speed-reading technique is taking in whole chunks and phrases at a time and not just word-by-word... which is what I tend to do most times anyway.  So when a particularly good chunk jumped out at me, I still had the capacity to say, "Woah, nice."  Conrad can really put words together when he wants to.  He calls one character a "paper-mache Mephistopheles", I mean... that's just excellent.  As for the racism that I've heard so much about with this book - it's pretty rampant.  So, my feeling is, if you can accept this as evidence of a particular, dark time and corresponding mode of thinking, then you can get past it and enjoy the rest of the book.   I was looking for some sort of sign of irony, that Conrad was messing with the assumptions of his audience, but in my speeding, at least, nothing jumped out at me.

Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby

I couldn't make it through this book!  I was shocked and appalled with myself, but in the first hundred pages or so, I was constantly drifting off.  No doubt that this is because I have no idea what most of the soccer/football references are, nor who the players or the teams are at all.  I do really enjoy soccer and I even tried to follow the most recent World Series, because Holland was doing well in it and my girlfriend was in England at the time.  But there was so many more soccer factoids than plot developments, I found myself wandering away.  From what I've heard, the book goes on to have some sort of romantic entanglements - where I guess they began to base the movie, but I didn't even get that far.  Sorry Nick Hornby.  You are perhaps one of my favorites and so, if I could have pushed myself to love it, I would have.  Maybe next time.  We now have "A Long Way Down" and I hear that's pretty good... so we'll see if I get there.

And I've just about finished with The Naked and The Dead, and I have some thoughts brewing about that, so hopefully I will find time to get them on here.  The bookshelf is starting to grow exponentially now, especially since my girlfriend has taken a job with a literary agency that sends her home with stacks of extra books three times a week.  I'll update the image above, if I can, to show you all what I've got waiting.  Oh, and "Crimes Against Nature", "Parables and Paradoxes", "The Problematic Rebel" and "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" are all graduation gifts from my girlfriend's grandparents and I'm going to have to at least read through them before I can see them again!

This book was recommended to me by a workshop-mate, just as it was coming out in paperback and making a bit of a splash.  It’s written by a professor that I didn’t ever get to have at Columbia, so I was curious to see how it stacked up.  My friend told me that it was the best voice in literature today and after reading the first few pages, I’d have to say I really do agree.  I’d quote some of it here, but I’m not sure how legal that is and I don’t want to piss off a fellow Columbian, but check it out on Amazon or something, you’ll see what I mean.

Lewis Miner, fondly recalled as “teabag” by his former high school classmates is tired of getting alumni newsletters filled with the shiny, happy thoughts of his fellow classmates, so he decides to write in with his own poetic and perverse tale of failure and despair.  The book is then a collection of these missives, each written in a high style that makes you feel like you’re reading the personal correspondance of Henry James or Walt Whitman, except that the subject matter is mostly Teabag and his best friend, Gary, getting stoned and getting wistful over the girls on the Jazz Dance team all those years ago.  High style meets low-down guys that are so pathetic, honest and loveable that you absolutely cannot stop reading.  Each chapter is like a superbly written poem about the perils of reaching middle age and realizing that you didn’t pan out.

Every guy that I know needs to get this book and read it, immediately.  Hell, the girls too.  The characters are beautiful and sad, familiar and ridiculous.  His best friend Gary has a small fortune that he and Teabag are whittling away at, ever since he sought therapy and a doctor unearthed memories of being tortured by his Satan-worshipping parents, and that he used to have a twin brother, “named either Barry or Octavian, slaughtered with goats in the back yard.”  He realizes eventually that these memories are actually scenes he saw once in a horror movie, so he sues the doctor for making him think it was real.  Hence his nickname, The Retractor and the name for his apartment, The Retractor Pad.  Teabag himself, is employed making up fake facts for a Coca-cola newsletter.  Then there’s Principal Fontana, fired for having an affair with a student, who Teabag admires and follow around through his sordid little circles.  Or Stacy Ryson, who once turned Lewis down for a dance, and now is the editor of the newsletter who refuses to actually print his rants and raves.  This is only a slice of the colorful cast, but you get the idea.

The voice is so strong you want to follow it anywhere, but a plot does slowly begin to develop, the entire novel building nicely towards (what else?) a class reunion at the end, where all the proverbially shit hits the fan.  Throughout the books I found myself rocketing between moments of empathy and disgust for Lewis, as I think was the point.  Some readers may find him uncontrollably irritating, but if you’ve ever had a good buddy just wallowing in his misery, this book will speak volumes.  Pure charisma is behind every bilious thing that Lewis says or does, and for that reason, I found this book absolutely irresistible and hysterical.  Highly, highly, recommend.

Let me start out with a quick apology for not updating this in a week or two. I’ve just started training for a new job and it’s been completely time-consuming. Of course it’s slowed me down a bit in terms of reading as well, but I read this one a few weeks back and just haven’t been able to update since then.

All right, on with the show. If you haven’t ever read anything by Ian McEwan before, I’d highly recommend some of his other books (maybe even before you get to this one, though not necessarily). He’s been consistently excellent at taking all kinds of different genres of books and making them genuine literature. Enduring Love is sort of a thriller, The Innocent a great spy/espionage novel, Amsterdam (which won the Booker Prize) is almost more like two intense character sketches, and Atonement, which is a war novel and then some. I’ve heard that some of his earliest novels are really dark and twisted. Lots of incest and child molestation and the like (The Child in Time, The Cement Garden and First Love, Last Rites) – but I haven’t read them, so I won’t pass any judgment.

Saturday is his latest novel, and once again it is an entirely unique beast. He takes us through a single Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon living in a very contemporary London (specifically the book is set on Saturday, February 15th, 2003). This sort of hyper-slowing down is not a new trick – Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway jump immediately to my mind. In fact, McEwan’s throwing his hat into the ring with two of the giants of Modernism with this book. Thankfully, this book is far less experimental than either of the others, at least in terms of language. Being in Henry Perowne’s stream of consciousness is a far more pleasant and less difficult experience.

Being a neurosurgeon, I found it somewhat appropriate that Perowne is constantly in flux between being overly-neurotic and overly-cerebral. Yeah, I crack myself up. But it’s true. The book opens with Perowne waking early and spotting a plane in the sky that is partially on fire. The book is intensely post-9/11, in that Perowne is more or less constantly checking the news – if he’s in the kitchen, his car, the office – and McEwan very skillfully taps into this familiar kind of paranoia throughout the day. Before long, every time Perowne turns on the television we are panicking that some building will have exploded. There’s also a large protest on the Iraq war going on in the background, which continues to surface as the story goes on.

All that being said, the action is pretty minimal for most of the book. Over 75% of the book is Perowne interacting with his family (all fascinating characters) playing squash with a friend, and preparing for a dinner party that evening with the whole family. However, this seldom bothered me at all because McEwan is such an amazing wordsmith that he never lets the innate tensions of the day drop, even for a moment. All of the characters and the scenes are so detailed and fluid that I found myself completely unable to put the book down. That being said, there is a disrupting encounter with a man that he gets into a car crash with and the last thirty pages of the book are so intensely twisted and tense that you feel like McEwan managed to condense the whole book’s worth of intensity in just that section. But I won’t get into any of that because it would absolutely ruin the book. Just as a caution, there may be some that feel like he doesn’t earn the material towards the end. I think if you’ve been interested and engaged all along, the ending will seem integral, though surprising. If you’ve been desperately waiting for something to happen, it risks becoming deus-ex-machina-tastic. I’d say it’s entirely dependant on what you bring to it, though. McEwan does about the best job that can be done with it – better than similar moments in say, Empire Falls by Richard Russo and that won a freaking Pulitzer. (And no, I haven’t had time to watch the new mini-series yet, but I intend to.)

Well, two weeks ago, I fully intended to go into depth about his whole family and why I really enjoyed all of their characters, but now I’m too nervous that I’ll botch the details without going back and really re-reading – again, I’m still sort of short on time. But that’ll be a lesson to me, I suppose – to get these up here faster. Until next time.

I tried to read Don Quixote.  Really I did.  Yes, inevitably the bookshelf has taken on a new order and I have gone ahead and bought several new books, which have taken thier place at the front of the bookshelf.  The observant reader will note that this reshuffling has placed the enormous, literary books in the back and the small, fun books closer to the front.  This was one of my fears as I shifted into a life of reading for fun and not graduate school.

On the plus side, this has been working very well for me so far.  I'm so used to reading for class that I find myself wanting to underline, take notes, jot down points to bring up in seminar... except wait... I have no one to impress anymore but myself.  And that's easy.  So this gives me the illusion of believing someone else may be impressed, I suppose.  Anyway, some new additions, real quick:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby
True Notebooks - Mark Salzman

I've finished Saturday and Homeland already, so those are forthcoming...

This book I picked for three reasons: my girlfriend had just read Decline and Fall, which she loved and described as Barthleme-ish, an outside reviewer of my novel told me that the beginning was surprisingly like Brideshead, and well, I learned long ago that Evelyn Waugh was a man and not a woman and this seemed like a good bit of literary trivia, which is tough to bring up unless you’ve ever read one of his books.

The middle reason here, actually had me in a minor panic as I read the opening chapters of Brideshead, because it was scarily like the book I’d just finished writing, and it would be a big waste of time if I’d unknowingly ripped off some classic of literature.  I’d met with author Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng), who was brilliant and wonderful and thoughtful, so I thought I owed him at least a plug on my non-blog that no one really reads. 

Anyway, the book does have some eerie similarities for about the first fifty pages, where the narrator, Charles Ryder, new to an Oxford college, meets a gregarious and ridiculous classmate named Sebastian Flyte, whose many quirks include drinking heartily and toting around a stuffed bear named Aloysius.  The two become close friends and wreak havok on the school for a little while, but there the similarities end, thankfully.  I’ll get on to the actual response in a second, but to explain the odd similarity, I think that it’s most likely that Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which did directly inspire my writing, probably was likewise inspired by Brideshead.  The Secret History is an amazing book, by the way, if you haven’t ever read it – I highly recommend.  I may just decide to reread it sometime, in which case I’ll write it up here.

Anyway, Brideshead opens with a really brilliant frame story.  Charles is much older, in command of some truly hopeless soldiers during the Second World War, when he stumbles upon the ruins of a once-glorious mansion.  He tells his second in command that he has been there before, long ago, and we are rocketed back into his nostalgic youth, as he remembers that aforementioned first day at school.  Brideshead ends up being the name of Sebastian’s family’s enormous estate, which Charles goes to visit early on in the novel.  There, Charles meets Sebastian’s sister, Julia, whom he develops a bit of a crush on.  Let’s just say that Waugh emphasizes how similar Julia and Sebastian look a bit more often than I’d like.  He also comes to have some rather heated debates about Catholicism with the matron of the family, Mrs. Marchmain.  Moreover, it is there that Charles paints his first masterpieces of some of the beautiful rooms in the house, which will eventually launch his career.

Here is where Waugh and I diverge, thankfully.  What begins as a lighthearted and nostalgic little book about the glory of Oxford boyhood slowly becomes more serious.  Sebastian slowly loses control his drinking and this tears him apart from both his family and Charles.  He gets kicked out of school and slowly drifts off the map as Charles rises to some small fame as an architectural painter, traveling the world with his American wife, whom he does not love, pining after Julia (and by association, Sebastian).  Don’t take my breezing over all this to mean that it is badly done at all.  By the time you reach the end of this book, the carefree college days are such a sharp contrast to the trouble-filled adult years that it really gets you.  Well, it got me anyway.  But the gamble here, of course, is that such a contrast can make you pine for the characters to find some return to their innocence, or it can make you stop reading after a hundred pages or so.  But Waugh handles this expertly, I think – knowing just when to introduce some truly bizarre, hysterical material to keep you reading.  One character, the effeminate stuttering monologist, Anthony Blanche, returns throughout the book – always just when it needs a bit of color. 

Apparently Waugh had been a Catholic convert and this book is supposed to indicate Ryder’s religious awakening.  Charles does have a lot of discussions with Lady Marchmain throughout the book about religion and why it makes no sense to him, and so on.  But while the ending moved me, I didn’t feel like it was overtly spiritual.  It seemed, instead, to me like Waugh was trying to show the huge divide that formed between Britain pre and post war, or from a less historical standpoint, the huge divide that will form in everyone between these days in our youths and the rest of our lives.  Not exactly a rosy outlook, but maybe something we can all identify with to some degree.  And if not, then read the opening and laugh at the drunken escapades, at least.

As a huge fan of Hornby’s other books, High Fidelity and About a Boy (haven’t read Fever Pitch and didn’t like How to be Good, sorry), as well as the corresponding movies made of them, I was excited to see another book out on the shelves by this British writer.  In my opinion he sits perfectly on the line between accessible and literary fiction.  Meaning that he is both popular and intelligent, which, by the looks of the bestseller list these days, is a tough feat.  His narrators are introspective and yet remarkably expressive, never betraying their everyman status by being overly-intellectual, yet always managing to bring some genuine philosophy to the table, often through popular music references, which he does well, and it is tough to do.  Also, something I’ve tried, in a novel that never quite got off the mat.

But this new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, turned out to be not another novel but a collection of columns/essays written for The Believer, a magazine which I only know is somehow affiliated or associated with the McSweeney’s/Dave Eggers phenomenon, but have never actually read.  Over the course of one year, he keeps monthly track of the books that he purchases and which ones he ends up reading, and then gives his two-cents on what he has read.  If this sounds familiar, then you’ve guessed it: I am ripping Mr. Hornby off, wholesale, with this blog.  I prefer to think of it as inspiration, not plagiarism, but I’m guessing that he’s not really going to notice, as he is well… famous and I am well… not.

Another quick confession: this book is (gasp) not actually mine.  I borrowed it from my girlfriend, whom I bought it for in Boston, sometime over the winter break, during some complicated exchange wherein I owed her money for something (let’s say, coffee) and she had a gift certificate for some bookstore which I used, since the bookstore was small and didn’t have the book she wanted, and so then later I combined the debts of the gift certificate and the coffee, and bought her this and America: The Book by Jon Stewart.  Whew.
 
With that out of the way, I highly recommend the book if you are at all a fan of his.  The writing is very funny, sometimes quite touching, and very casual overall.  Much like this little experiment of mine, the overall feel is very much of a good friend telling you, quite honestly, what worked for him and what didn’t.  I would caution you, however, it may not be of great use as a guide of books to buy, unless you are looking to get a little obscure.  Some of the books are by British authors and he doubts will even be available in the States.  Others are just so offbeat that you might have trouble finding them, even with the benefit of amazon.com and the like. 

He is remarkably warm, and open about himself in the columns.  One month, for example, he reads several books about autism, because he has an autistic son, whom he gladly talks about in his analysis of a novel by a mother who has two afflicted sons.  And while you may not want to go out and buy the book (though you might, he provides a great excerpt) you might walk away knowing a bit more about the subject.  That reminds me, he also put together an actually surprisingly amazing short story collection called Speaking with the Angel, the proceeds of which went to a school for autistic kids in England.  He wrote a story in it that has actually stuck with me, about a security guard at a museum, who is guarding a profane work of art from the public.  If I remember right, it is a collage of small photos of bare breasts that, from a distance, looks just like Raphael’s Madonna and Child.  Brilliantly, his narrator is (again) a regular Joe, but as the guard of the artwork, he feels he understands and it on some higher level than the philistines that come and shake their fists at it.  I won’t give away the ending, but it’s equally brilliant to the premise.  Sorry for another tangent here.

Another (minor) downside of the book is that, in the second column, Hornby describes being reprimanded by the strange group of new-agey people who run The Believer, whom he likes to the equally strange musical ensemble, The Polyphonic Spree.  Hence, the title of the book, I guess.  Anyway, the Spree apparently allows no negativity whatsoever in the book reviews of The Believer, and Hornby has broken this rule by saying he couldn’t finish some book in the first month.  After this he occasionally will disguise books he doesn’t like/finish as “Unnamed Novel” before he explains what bugged him about it.  This takes some wind out of the sails, for me, because I feel like it doesn’t do much good to talk about what was wrong with a book that we couldn’t possibly investigate on our own.  But, as I said, many of the books are a bit obscure to begin with, and the columns are not really supposed to be about reviewing these books.  So what are they supposed to be about?

The collected columns end up being more about the pleasure of buying books, the trials and tribulations of reading them, and the strange things that lead us from one book to the next.  There are some wonderful places where the book that he has just read (David Copperfield, for one) affects the way he reads the next book.  How do you follow the experience of reading Dickens?  Do you go straight for some mass-market paperback that you know will pale by comparison, or do you leap for something of supposed equal worth?  What happens if you read a book that would have otherwise been a knockout, but is just so-so after finishing a genuine masterpiece?  If these are the sorts of questions that you might like to think about for a hundred or so pages, then pick up the book.  It’ll make you think about what it means to be a reader, what it means to love books, and what it means to build a life around them.