Choosing a Book is Like Choosing a Lover - Prelim

The title is the conclusion I have come to. I am having issues choosing what book to read next. While staring at my bookshelf, longingly scanning over their titles and their attractive facades. I have an idea of what most of them contain. I know what they could offer, the level of commitment they will require, the experiences and knowledge they might share.

However, I cannot choose. Because I cannot commit. War and Peace is staring at me. It is saying I offer love of the highest grade, love you have often thought of, love in a epic fashion. Your life will be richer with me in it. War and Peace is right of course, but it will also take time. It will take effort. It will take some degree of exclusivity and investment. I am not sure I am ready for that. And we know if you start a relationship we are not ready for it is harder to pick it back up later. We must see it through to the end and offer the commitment required to do just that.

So, I read a book I know I can finish quickly and enjoy it for the weekend - in the most recent case Wonder Boys (review coming). Then I move on and stare again at my shelf and all the books waiting to be read. Like un-examined lives, paths that might be taken, people who we might meet. It all terrifies me. How does on commit wholly to an endeavor knowing it will end and pursuing that end for some form of resolution when they know the end will be the end of that world.

One of my Professors says he no longer reads Bleak House, but he lives in that book. At this point it has become so much a part of his life. It holds the position of an exalted lover. Sure they are not exclusive, no love should be, but there is a commitment there.

I have often said I want to find a book I can live in, a story that I can inhabit, but I am afraid what will happen when I do. There are so many books out there screaming for attention screaming about the possibilities that they might hold. Who knows if War and Peace will do for me what In Search of Lost Time or Ulysses can do?

Like the rest of my life I am faced with an impasse of thought. A realization that the postmodern condition, the lack of ability to say anything with certainty, makes me uncertain, indecisive, and fearful of being unjustly labeled by my choice of a companion.

The book I want right now does not exist. The one that requires little attention, hardly any focus, and offers unlimited rewards. Like a love affair this cannot exist because it would not be fair. Reading is not a hard activity, but it is an activity that requires time and rewards commitment.

So, I guess that means the question I need to answer is.... What am I willing to share my life with?

Some Great Literary Quotes

While I continue to play catch up with my work, putting this blog on hold, here are some quotes by literary figures that I have seen recently:

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Will blog again soon!

What I Am Reading and Looking at Now

Since my last update of this sort I have let my reading load spiral out of control. I have 8ish books going at the moment. Today I got closer to finishing two.

The Prague Cemetery is now done.
Living in the End Times is on stall.
Collected Poems of Yeats are amazing.
The Hidden Reality is going to be reengaged with soon.
The Odyssey is going kinda.
Building Stories needs some attention
Sandman Vol. 6 is perhaps my favorite thus far
Stories of John Cheever are always a pleasure to read in small doses

I set out to spend a good deal of the day knocking more of these out. I ended up blogging on my personal blog, writing a poem, writing in a journal type thing I keep, going for a run, and funding some kickstarters. Not all that successful.

Anyways, look as these cool paintings:

I think they are cool so I thought I would share.

Anyways, expect a review of The Prague Cemetery soon along with my thoughts on some short stories I have been reading by various authors.

Classics Club

Thanks to La Graciada - who is much better at consistently blogging than I am - I have now stumbled upon the classics club. Since she thought she was late to the party I can only assume that means I am extremely late to the party, but the idea sounded so great that I cannot pass it up.

You pick 50 "classic books" which you want to read over a set time period. I am really just listing these in the order they come to me / the order I see them on my bookshelf. I am going to make one of these for movies as well in the coming weeks.

I am really interested in finding out what other people's lists look like, so if you have made one or want to put the link in a comment or just paste the list so I can check it out.

1.     War and Peace - Tolstoy 

2.     Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man - Joyce

3.     Ulyssess - Joyce

4.     The Illiad - Homer

5.     Sir Gwain and the Green Knight

6.     Canterbury Tales - Chaucer (I've only read parts)

7.     Il Decameron - Boccaccio (I am going to read it in Italian!)

8.     The Name of the Rose - Eco (Not sure if I'll try it in Italian)

9.     If on a winters night a traveler.... - Calvino

10. Invisible Cities - Calvino

11. V - Pynchon

12. Underworld - Delillo

13. To the Lighthouse - Wolff

14. Orlando - Wolff

15. Tropic of Capricorn - Miller

16. Middlesex - Eugenides

17. Nausea - Satre

18. Waverly - Sir Walter Scott

19. Mysterious Stranger No. 44 - Twain

20. Complete Short Stories - John Cheever

21. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

22. The Invisible Man - Ellison

23. Giovanni's Room – Baldwin

24. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Cather

25. Chery Orchard - Chekhov

26. Fictions - Borges

27. House of Leaves - Danielwski

28. Leaves of Grass - Whitman (I've only read parts)

29. The Complete Poems - Philip Larkin

30. Paradise Lost - Milton

31. Great Expectations - Dickens

32. Tale of Two Cities - Dickens

33. Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky

34. Absalom, Absalom! - Faulkner

35. Light in August - Faulkner

36. Tender is the Night - Fitzgerald

37. Catch-22 - Heller

38. The Blind Assasin - Atwood

39. Love in a Time of Cholera - Marquez

40. 100 Years of Solititude - Marquez 

41. Moby Dick - Melville

42. Perdido Street Station - Mieville

43. Beloved - Morrison

44. Lolita - Nabokov

45. Interpreter of Maladies - Lahiri

46. Homage to Catalonia - Orwell

47. Ars Amartoria - Ovid (in Latin)

48. Snow - Orhan Pamuk

49. Measure for Measure - Shakespeare

50. Satanic Verses - Rushdie

51. The Inverted Forest - Salinger

52. The Importance of Being Earnest - Wilde

53. Germinal - Zola

54. Collected Poems - Yeats

55. Footnotes in Gaza – Sacco (Comic)

56. Invisibles – Morrison (Comic)

57. The Dispossessed - Ursla

58. Red Mars - Stanley Robinson

59. The Souls of Black Folk - Dubois

60. Black Reconstruction - Dubois

61. History of the Siege of Lisbon - Saramago

62. My Name is Red - Pamuk

63. This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz

64. Ubik - Dick

65. Age of Revolutions - Hobsbawm

66. Living in the End Times - Zizek

67. The Political Unconcious - Jameson

68. Metahistory - White

69. Sweet Thursday - Steinbeck

70. The Book of Daniel - Doctorow

71. Ragtime – Doctorow

72. The Autumn of the Middle Ages

73. War of the End of the World - Vargos

74. Magnus - Brown

75. Complete Plays - Euripides (In Latin)

76. Hidden Reality - Greene

77. America - Bauldrillard

78. Society of Spectacle - Debord

79.  The Age of Wire and String – Marcus

80.  2666 - Bolano

After making this list I am confronted by the fact that there are about 200 more books that easily come to mind to be added. Guess I need to get started. Also note this list does not represent everything I am going to read over the time period allotted - in my case four years - but just an idea of some of what I will definitely be reading.

New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine

I received a few new books in the mail yesterday. My excitement could not be contained. Instead of re-reading the Odyssey for a free online course I am taking I dove right into one of these new books. New York Drawings is a collection work from Adrian Tomine, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker over the last decade. I bought this book thinking I would be disappointed. I had seen some of Tomine's New Yorker covers before - I have a copy of the great Amazon delivery one somewhere - but most of my exposure to his work had been through two of his graphic novels (Shortcomings and Summer Blonde). The main thought running through my mind as I opened the book was will Tomine's themes of loneliness and alienation blend well with his love of awkward moments in a single panel?

My worries were for nothing! This collection is amazing. I want to leave it on my coffee table so everyone can marvel over the images as I have. Some of my favorites - The Lost Girl and Meditation - are not available online to show you and I am to lazy to scan them myself, but trust me they are so beautifully simple.

Tomine manages to condense complexity to one page over and over. Take the cover above. Has one image ever so subtly mocked our entire conception of reality? We are obsessed with seeing what is real on T.V. and experiencing simulated realities. Yet, the image mocks this whole concept. It seems to call for the people watching the movie to take down the screen and stare at the real existence behind it.

The image below is equally stunning and simple. Two strangers on trains heading separate directions make eye contact as they read the same book. The loneliness and sense of lost opportunity that this image conveys needs time to be properly absorbed. Perhaps this is love for Tomine - two strangers destined to be heading separate ways.

There are also a few short comic strips in here that showcase the wit and dialogue of Tomine - which is almost always great. However, if you really want to have more experiences with Tomine's comic work I would suggest picking up Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, or Optic Nerve #12 - they are all pretty amazing.

If you are looking for a coffee table book, love drawings, are a fan of Tomine, or just want something different check this book out. If you happen to see it somewhere take a few moments to browse through it. This book is worth a first and second look.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

The collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver is essential reading for short story writers. I say this because what he did seems to be the constant source of bad imitation.

You could easily say his stories are about nothing - as I have heard said before. However, this would be inaccurate. Carver's stories are simply about people and the mundane everyday. His stories are minimalist to the extreme - which is what he is known for - and yet Carver still manage to create an entire world in them. Carver's stories are filled with small holes, but the familiarity of his stories allow the reader to automatically fill in the blanks. (I am left thinking about the amazing things many verbose fantasy writers could learn from Carver's more "literary" form of world creation)

My favorite story of the bunch is "I Could See the Smallest Things." The story is a perfect example of Carver's writing. It takes place in a brief moment in time. Nothing happens except the passing of life. I would recommend you all to check it out.

Many of the other stories are equally fantastic. There are really no complete duds in the bunch. If you are at all interested in the short story, I would go read a few of these quick gems in a bookstore or online somewhere and see if its for you. Carver is not a writer I would read everyday - I enjoy things a little more out there - but I am sure I will read more of his stories and books to satisfy my sporadic reality based literary fiction cravings.

Weight by Jeanette Winterson (Audio Review)

I am taking a course on Greek and Roman Myth on Coursera - an online website where anyone can take free college level courses. As a result, I am thinking about Myths and Folklore more, which is something I have always greatly enjoyed.

The above cover is from one of my favorite re-tellings - which is to say any telling - of a Greek myth. Weight by Jeanette Winterson is the story of Hercules and Atlas. In the story we are introduced to a Hercules that is the ultimate male Id running around the Ancient World - fornicating, masturbating, and killing - unburdened. He is juxtaposed to Atlas, the immortal Titan, a creature of all burden. The story probes the interactions between these two figures for all their philosophical value. For Jeanette Winterson, Atlas is a deeply tortured individual facing a punishment disproportionate to his perceived crime. His burden is only briefly lifted by a reluctant and opportunistic Hercules during his quest for the Golden Apples.

Winterson manages to do what any writer must do with a story we all know - which is arguably all stories - offer a fresh lens through which we perceive the world and the myth. For Winterson this is the crucial point of story. In the introduction Winterson says the Cannongate Myth Series - of which this is part - is a opportunity for "Re-telling stories for their own sakes and finding in them permanent truths about human nature. All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip other voices may be heard speaking of the life of the mind and the soul's journey." For Winterson the Weight is the necessity of story.

I find myself continually revisiting passages from this book from time to time on audio - I do not own a hard copy of the book. I am always astonished by the honesty and force of the myth.

If this sounds like a book you would be interested in I would highly recommend it.

If you have read this book what did you think?

Excerpt From Junot Diaz Interview

'The Baseline Is, You Suck': Junot Diaz on Men Who Write About Women

• The Atlantic: It sounds like you're saying that literary "talent" doesn't inoculate a writer—especially a male writer—from making gross, false misjudgments about gender. You'd think being a great writer would give you empathy and the ability to understand people who are unlike you—whether we're talking about gender or another category. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
• Junot Diaz: I think that unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations. Without fail. The only way not to do them is to admit to yourself [that] you're fucked up, admit to yourself that you're not good at this shit, and to be conscious in the way that you create these characters. It's so funny what people call inspiration. I have so many young writers who're like, "Well I was inspired. This was my story." And I'm like, "OK. Sir, your inspiration for your stories is like every other male's inspiration for their stories: that the female is only in there to provide sexual service." There comes a time when this mythical inspiration is exposed for doing exactly what it's truthfully doing: to underscore and reinforce cultural structures, or I'd say, cultural asymmetry.

This is so right on point. I cannot wait to read his new book (see image above) - especially after this. I have lots of issues writing compelling female characters and I have always known this is the reason . It takes a lot of effort to work against society and ingrained hate. We are screwed up people. 

Thanks Junot. 

Via Atlantic

What I am Reading

I am horrible with formality. The formal nature of this blog, or at least the formal nature I had ascribed to it, was killing me. I cringe when I think about sitting down to write a casual book review. It seems so uncasual. So, I am attempting a change. The biweekly type of reviews will still come - hopefully now on a biweekly schedule. However, now I am also going to write about what I am reading and just stuff to do with literature as well.

I am currently about a hundred pages in to Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. I am finally beginning to see where we are going now in the story and I have to say I think I am going to love it. I wish my Italian was good enough to read this in the original. I will write a review when I finish it, but so far so good.

I am also delving into a new comic series that comes highly recommended called The Manhattan Project. I have only read the first issue of the trade paperback which contains the first five issues. However, the premise of a historical science fiction tale about Oppenheimer's evil twin - and his many personalities - killing Oppenheimer and taking over the project and all its top secret experiments in so far an awesome premise. Its getting weird and crazy. Luckily the art is up to the challenge. I was super excited to finish work today so I could come home and read some more of these.

I also started Consider Phlebas, but I got stuck at the end of the first section. It was a really big week at work and I get antsy when I spent a few days not progressing on a book and switch to something else. I am going to return to it. Iain Banks has a great world created that I am sure is going to provide me with a lot of awesome stories to read.

That is all for now!

Goodnight.

Invisible People by WIll Eisner

Will Eisner was one of the most recognizable names in comic history. He invented the graphic novel and changed sequential art doing what he loved. He has a yearly comic award that shares his name. For these reasons I have always wanted to read some of his work. However, the logical starting point, The Spirit, his serialized "superhero" story, has never appealed to me  - I do not think it will live up to its reputation. As a result I took the suggestion of a number of friends and critics whose opinion I trust and started with Invisible People (W.W. Norton).

This book is nicely put together, which can be especially important for graphic novels. There are no cut off images in the cracks (although Eisner doesn't seem to have that style) and no problem with binding. The book is divided into three stories, all of which deal with the anonymity and alienation of city life in a different way. Each story has a distinct flavor and contained plot, but they are designed to be read together.

I greatly admire the plotting of the stories. There is no wasted space, which astounds me as someone who has read their fair share of modern comics. The stories flow from one point to the next and it never seems choppy or rushed. 

The dialogue is a little sub-par at some points. Every time a character says the line "they are an invisible person," it feels forced and stale. For the most part though it is passable and standard, but nothing spectacular.

The substance of the stories is strong. They do an excellent job of imagining the lives of people we pass everyday and have no clue exist. The stories are simplistic in some ways: They are set in an earlier "simpler" time, the characters themselves are mostly archetypes, many of the complexities of the city are ignored to focus on the main themes listed above. However, these simplifications are not made unconsciously. Will Eisner states in his introduction that he chose to set the stories in the 1930's because the intricacies of modern city life are far more complex and difficult to navigate. Eisner is trying to paint a picture that does not need a modern backdrop. These stories could have been set in almost any major city throughout history - with obvious occupation and technology changes - and they would still work. This is because they are not simple. They are probing and capture a detailed image of one of the failures of city - particularly American city - life, the inability of its inhabitants to connect with everyone around them. 

The world of these stories is a mechanical system. Reminiscent of the great bureaucratic dystopian stories like Kafka's The Trial, the sense of immobility in the shadow of an oppressive and unforgiving way of life is beautifully realized in all its despair.

Individually, the drawings are mostly unspectacular, but competent work. Sequentially the art flows well from one point to the next. They manage to capture facial expressions and moods of the characters well. Overall, good cartooning, but not my favorite art.

Verdict: I would recommend this book to anyone interested in comics in the classic vein. I will read more of Will Eisner after reading this book, but I am in no rush to do so. 

Let me know what you think below. I know this blog is slowly turning to the other kind of bi-weekly, but one day soon it should be back to twice a week!

Thanks for reading!

The Works of "Jason" - An Alert

Going to try something different already! I am going to talk about the work of an author I whose work is relatively new to me, but all around spectacular. Let me know what you think in the comments section below. 

 

The above picture is from a book of one of my favorite cartoonists, who uses the nom de plume, Jason. In the picture two boyhood friends play on a tree hanging over a cliff. In the previous scene the friend dressed in all white has jumped and swung around. Now his friend tries to imitate him but as you can see, he hesitates, he is concerned. It is from this page that the larger story gets its title "Hey... Wait!" 

I want talk a little about Jason and this page provides a good idea of the quality of his work. Although he is well received by critics, I think Jason is still an under-appreciated artist. His work not only delves deeply into the core of humanity, but its funny and easy to read. So far, I have read through two of the larger collections of his work published in translation by Fantagraphics: What I Did and Almost Silent. The first one surprised me. I was not expecting the poetic easy flow of his drawings and sparing use of dialogue (something that I feel is clear in the panel above). The second confirmed my opinion. 

If you have any interest in comics or are a purveyor of story in any form. I would give the work of Jason a read.  

For more information check out Comic Book Resources: Robot 6 Blog's Comic College on Jason.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris - Back Review

 For this first "Back Review" I am going to go with a book I read about three or four years ago. I randomly picked the book up in a bookshop. This is something that would almost never happen now, as I tend to over-think my book purchases. It had good reviews on the back and sounded like just the type of comedic, but elegantly written novel I was looking for at the time. The book is titled Then We Came to the End.

Then We Came to the End (Back Bay Books, 2007) is the debut novel of Joshua Ferris. It follows the lives of office workers at a Chicago advertising agency during the economic downturn of the 1990s. The characters are eclectic and odd. Yet, if you have ever worked in an office environment you will immediately recognize them in those around you. Their lives are insignificant and pointless. Their reasoning is often irrational. However, they are very funny.
This is the type of book that can, and will, make you both laugh and cry. 

The book draws on a number of intersecting stories to achieve this balance of comedy and tragedy. However, it sticks with its characters enough to let them all have their own story arcs.
The book is written in a non-linear manner, but it is not hard to follow. Still, I do not think the non-linearity was necessary, or added anything, to the story.

The book is told in a broad narrative style. It strives to make the reader part of the narrative. This technique never feels overdone and does a great job of making the reader feel at home in the novel. Towards the end it comes off a little cliche, but not necessarily in a bad way.

The prose is crisp and clean. One of my favorite paragraphs in this book comes early in the first chapter. It is a great example not only of this cleanliness, but also the themes in the book:
"...Might it be true, as we sometime feared on the commute home, that we were callous, unfeeling individuals, incapable of sympathy, and full of spite toward people for no reason other than their proximity and familiarity? We had these sudden revelations that employment, the daily nine-five, was driving us far from our better selves. Should we quit? Would that solve it? Or were those qualities innate, dooming us to nastiness and paucity of spirit? We hoped not."

This paragraph seems a nice ending summation of what to expect from the novel. If you work in an office and like to read I think you will enjoy Then We Came to the End. 

Please let me know what you think about this post, the book, or my blog in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

For the first full review I have chosen a newer book by one of the more linguistically innovative mainstream contemporary writers. I used this blog as an excuse to purchase this book and to motivate myself to review more timely books. Now that I have it finished it is time to begin my blogging quest.

Postmodernism has a tentative relationship with language. I hesitate to say it is looked on as a necessary evil, because this is too cliche and does not appropriately convey the complicated nature of the relationship. However, postmodernism teaches to be wary of language's role in our world - perhaps it even is our world. This recent - and the biblical - trepidation towards language is a central theme in Ben Marcus's new novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf © 2012 $25.95).

In the novel language is a deadly disease that rots the body and turns the mouth into a snarl. Only children seem to be immune to this pandemic. Their free use of language slowly harming, and giving them power over, the adults of society.

On its most basic level the novel is a story about what happens in a post-apocalyptic world when language is the apocalypse. As you can imagine large swaths of the novel pass by with minimal dialogue. It seems often a loophole has to be invented for direct communication. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the way the characters, and we as readers, come to adjust to the lack of verbal communication. Even with its sparse dialogue the book moves at a quick pace and is never bogged down with overly expository passages.

The characters are one of the weaker points of the story. They are mostly caricatures: A mom who loves her daughter more than anything, a father trying to save his family, a daughter who hates the world, and a devil that does not seem very evil, are some of the primary players. Although this use of caricatures may be purposeful, these uses of the 'everyman' characters in post-apocalyptic fiction is an unfortunate trope in this reviewers opinion.  Despite the lack of depth to these characters they are still entertaining enough to move the plot forward.

The novel is almost meant to be inferred rather than understood. It is a parable about the overuse and abuse of language. There is no understanding as a result of our failures to define clearly the speech we are using. Marcus handles this concept well. Four chapters into the novel he spells it out to us in a great paragraph:
"... It troubled us that our common sense has so little medical traction. There were doctors, and there were armchair doctors, and then there were people like us, crawling in the mud, deploying childish diagnostics, hoping that through sheer tone of voice, through the posturing of authority, we would exact some definitive change of reality. Perhaps we thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said. Maybe we still believed that."

This seems to challenge the postmodern paradigm of language. It seems to say that although we think we can alter the world with language, and our bold assertions, we have so far been unable to prove it. Perhaps language does not shape the world around us as much as bring death to it. Perhaps our mindless talk is the ruination of the world. Perhaps language makes us feel like gods. As Marcus says, "we make language in our own image and the language repulses us."

The book suggests that it is our playful useless banter, our postmodern need to speak endlessly on topics to no greater understanding is dangerous. "Child's Play" is deadly. There is no innocence in our play with language and we must recognize our impact. Language is killing us. Shut up and listen, because only by studying the byproduct of our speech can we be cured.

The book is worth checking out, but based on what I have seen Marcus accomplish in his debut short story collection Age of Wire and String I have to admit I was expecting more. However, it is obviously unfair to level critique against a book that is trying to do something in a different way than its predecessors.

If you are interested Knopf produced a video trailer for the novel, a cool concept in itself (See below). Also, please comment and let me know what you think, give me advice, or just say hello.