Read and run

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, 13/05

Since the new year I have read several dozen books, some of them good, some of terrible (Philip Roth, why do I bother), some of them confusing (what is up with Riddley Walker), some of them King Lear, but none of them have been as wonderful, as moving, as magnificent as Fathers and Sons (sorry, King Lear). I’ve been in a very peculiar frame of mind lately, and that might have something to do with how much I loved the book. But guys, it was so good. The blurb on the back cover says that the novel “contains some of the most moving scenes in the literature of any language”, and that is not an overstatement.

You are all hereby assigned to read Fathers and Sons over the summer and report back.

Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition by Caroline Alexander, 21/04

This is a lovely, lovely book about a Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition told from the point of view of the ship’s cat. If you like cats or Antarctic exploration or faux scholarly books, I recommend it. It is not at all twee, as you might expect from a book narrated by a cat.

CAVEAT LECTOR: do not, I repeat DO NOT google “Mrs. Chippy” and under no circumstances whatsoever should you read the Wikipedia article about Mrs. Chippy, otherwise Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition will become the saddest book you’ve ever read. I cried at the end. What can I say? I have a soft heart.

Mass Updates

… are easier than individual posts. Here is what I read in March.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 02/03

Very, very good. I enjoyed it a lot more than The Robber Bride, which is the only other Atwood I’ve read recently (Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake, and The Handmaid’s Tale are too far back to remember). I really enjoyed the framing of the second story-within-a-story and how both parts of the book slowly converge. The pieces don’t all fall into place until the very end of the novel, which is something I really like.

Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl, 04/03

So, so, so good. The best non-fiction book I’ve read this year. It’s a collection autobiographical essays (and corresponding recipes), mostly about the relationship between people and food, which is what life is really about, right? Plus Ruth Reichl kind of reminds me of my mom. If you love food you will like this book. If you don’t love food then I don’t know why we’re even friends.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, 09/03

Wrote about it here.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapúscinski, 15/03

Very good. I found it a little disconcerting the way Kapúscinski jumped around so much (through time and space) with nothing but Herodotus to connect the different parts of his story, but that’s hardly a criticism at all. I did love the way he talked about The Histories, and he sold the book so well that I went out and bought a copy after I finished. Recommended.

N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto, 17/03

Good. Better than Kitchen, which seemed really spacey. The story was good and weird, and the narrator was sweet. I flew through it and was very satisfied at the end.

Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Bashford, 20/03

Wrote about it here, but I have to say again: READ IT.

Mr. Standfast by John Buchan, 25/03

A top-notch spy novel. Richard Hannay, the main character, is a racist, sexist, one-sided dick but I suppose you take what you can get from 1919. Very enjoyable for what it is, though.

The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut, 27/03

Excellent. This would be the best non-fiction book I’ve read all year if Tender at the Bone wasn’t so damn good. Vonnegut really does a good job of showing what mental illness feels like to the person who is suffering from it. Besides the mental illness, the book has hippies, drugs, communes, political unrest, and familial conflict- what more could you want?

Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Sir Henry Bashford, 20/03

 

Hilarious! I don’t remember who recommended this, but it has been on my list for a while. The story is told by the main character himself, very seriously and straight-faced. The funny bits all come from reading between the lines. Some of the comic episodes remind me of Wodehouse (a tee-totaller is secretly given large amounts of alcohol, and then has to make a speech in front of a large audience, to disastrous results), but Augustus Carp has got to be the direct ancestor of Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces.

Excellent comic novel. You can read it here.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, 09/03

Boy, do I have a lot of things to say about this book. Let me see if I can remember them all.

I love everything William Gibson has ever written, and I love alternate history, so I should love The Difference Engine, right? Did I love it? I don’t know. It was sprawling, somewhat directionless, and I don’t think the different plot points were as well-connected as they could have been. I originally attributed that to the book having been written by two authors, which may be true, but it also seems appropriate that the narrator of the novel is [SPOILER?] a computer (the difference engine itself). I wouldn’t expect the difference engine to connect the dots like a human.

Anyway, while the story is interesting and engaging, the details are really off-putting. It was difficult for me to focus on what was happening, especially at the beginning, because the historical context and the very steampunkness of the novel were very distracting. Gibson, in the sprawl trilogy, is really good at making the reader accept entirely unrealistic and fantastical things as reality. Unfortunately he didn’t bring much of this skill to The Difference Engine, but you should remember that it was written by two people.

There is a small but perceptible shift in the writing styles, though I didn’t pick up on it at first. Most sections were written in a neutral sort of voice, not distinctively Gibson (and I’ve never read Bruce Sterling before), but some were actually quite bad. In one specific section I was frowning at this piece of stilted dialogue:

But now Brian fixed Fraser with a soldier’s steely eye. “Did you ever have a little sister, Mr. Fraser? Did you ever have to watch that girl’s happiness shattered like a china cup, trampled by a monster? And with her broken heart, the honest heart of a Crimean hero, whose simple, manly intention was to make her his bride—”

Fraser groaned aloud. “Enough!”

Ok, ok. Brian is a ham. Fraser can groan and speak at the same time. But then a couple of pages later I read this line:

Brian stared at his younger brother, and winced.

Terrible! So bad I had to try it out myself. First I stared and winced at the same time, then I stared for a full two seconds before I winced. Neither one made any sense, and everyone else on the metro thought I was crazy.

It was fun, though. I never got bored with it. My edition has a really interesting afterword by both authors where they talked about their writing process (sending floppy disks through the mail!). Check it out if you like that kind of thing.

alaina asked: Would you consider doing "status update" type of posts that simply state what book you are reading? Please y Gracias.

That’s a great idea, since my one big goal for this year (keep up with Read and Run) isn’t really panning out.

Right now I’m reading Light in August. One of the things I love about Faulkner is that his novels are infinitely forgettable, and I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. This is the third time I’ve read Light in August, yet it seems like the first. I don’t remember anything from the last two readings but the names of the main characters. Anyway, it is very good.

Before I picked up Light in August I read The Neverending Story, which has only improved with time. It was so engrossing that I sometimes had that post-afternoon-nap feeling after I closed the book, a very where-am-I, what-day-is-it type of disorientation. I’ve said it before, but I’ll reiterate: true literary quality is, for me, when a book makes me miss my stop in the metro.

De nada!

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, 09/01

(Photo source)

I hated it, then I begrudgingly enjoyed it, then I got into it, then I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. I didn’t love Absurdistan, either, so I wasn’t disappointed. I think Shteyngart is much too gimmicky a writer to produce something that really resonates with me. I did, however, appreciate the way the story was told, through messages, diary entries, and straight storytelling. It allowed each of the main characters to have their own voice, and fleshed them out nicely.

At the beginning I thought I was never going to be able to make it through a book whose entire cast I hated (and boy, did I hate them) and whose social/cultural setting was so much more flesh-crawlingly creepy than 1984 ever was. I began to like the book a lot more around the time the disturbances started occurring (I’m trying not to spoil anything here), but it was only in the last 10 pages or so, an introduction of sorts to a fictional edition of the book, that everything tied together, that it became anything more than what the title suggests- a super sad true love story.

I recommend the book if you’re a quick reader or you like near-future dystopian fiction that you could actually imagine coming true. Otherwise you might be better off rereading 1984 for the tenth time.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow, 18/01

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When I read a book that other people like and I can hardly get through it, I always wonder where I could possibly have gone wrong. I’m not saying that Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a book that other people enjoy- I don’t actually know because I haven’t talked to anyone else about it- but I do know that it won the National Book Award. That means something, doesn’t it?

I’ve liked everything of Bellow’s that I’ve read to date (Augie March, Ravelstein, Henderson the Rain King) and I would put Henderson the Rain King in my top ten favorite books ever. And I can’t say that Mr. Sammler’s Planet is different from any other Bellow novel I’ve read- I might even go so far as to say that it is the distilled essence of Saul Bellow.

But I had so much trouble getting through it. I even put it down a few times to start something else, a thing I almost never do. It was basically one long, rambling monologue broken up here and there by flashes of plot. I was expecting there to be more, well, action, more flashbacks to Mr. Sammler’s experiences in the war, more about H.G. Wells, more about living on the moon. These subjects were all central to the plot, but since there wasn’t much plot to begin with, they ended up as mere jumping-off points for Mr. Sammler’s philosophy, the true center of the book. Even one of the main characters, Dr. Govinda Lal, and the one of the main plot points, the theft of Dr. Lal’s manuscript, were never fully fleshed out.

Caveat lector, this is just my opinion. Even though I didn’t enjoy it, I do recognize that it is a very good novel, and I am sure some of you have read it and really liked it (will read it/ will like it). But not me.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, 02/01

The Laura Ingalls Wilder canon forms what is probably the most important part of my personal childhood mythology (along with Finn McCool, The Elephant’s Child, and Star Wars Episodes IV - VI, among others). I was really glad to find these books again when I was home over Christmas because I reference them on a regular basis and I wanted to read them again.

I only had time to read Little House in the Big Woods before I left. It was not only as good as I remember, but even better! Whereas my 10-year-old self loved the part about the pig’s bladder, the maple-sugar candy, and the bear that was actually a stump, the 27-year-old me was more interested in the details about how the candy was made, about the way they preserved their food (hanging from the rafters in the attic! swoon), the handmade presents they all gave each other on Christmas, how Laura and Mary would lie awake at night and listen to Pa playing the fiddle. I wanted to pinch the book on it little paper cheeks. It is wonderful to revisit something you loved at another point in your life and find that it has improved with age*, even though you never thought there was room for improvement.

An excellent start to 2012.

*Perhaps you are the one who has improved with age?: Debate.

2011 Year in Review

In 2010 I did a really good breakdown of all the books I’d read that year, separated them into different categories, made some inferences, etc. A 2011 Year in Review is going to be a lot more difficult because I am missing 80% of my list. While I did read 100 (or 101, 102?) books in 2011, my computer died at the beginning of November. Like an idiot, I never backed anything up. Everything on the old hard drive is salvageable, I just don’t have the hardware to do it yet, and I am dragging my feet.

I also let Read and Run lapse round about April. I kept up the hope for a while that I was going to be able to catch up on all my posts, but in May I realized that it was a lost cause.

My two goals for 2011 were:

1. Read 20% non-fiction

2. Read 10% en español

Even without consulting the list I am sure I accomplished the first one. Alaina’s regular book deliveries really helped. Off the top of my head (and looking around at my shelves) I think the best non-fiction book I read this year was The Bone Woman (subtitle: A Forensic Anthropoligist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo). It was very, very good. I also loved The Mole People, though its non-fiction status is debatable.

I definitely did not read 10 books en español. This year, especially the first six months, I will remember as the year of anxiety and panic attacks, and when I need to escape in literature I want to do it in English. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

For 2012 I will give myself the same goals as last year, with the addition of:

3. Keep up with Read and Run.

Lastly, I think it’s interesting to compare my stack of books to read circa January 2011:

And my stack of books to read circa January 2012:

It may not look like much, but it’s stacked two deep. I now have more books in queue than I can read in a year (unless I quit my job)!