I took a DNA test; I'm 100% Wednesday
Sep. 4th, 2019 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bReading Wednesday is in a bit of a rut since I haven't had much time to read in the past couple of weeks, and what time I've had has been dominated by Thomas Pynchon.
What I've Finished Reading
I did get a brief break from Gravity's Rainbow when I borrowed the latest Most Comfortable Man in London mystery, The Vanishing Man - a perfectly inoffensive collection of gentle infodumps and stacks of toast. A duke's undistinguished painting is stolen, Finch-Lenox muses on the history of and proper modes of address for the British peerage, Jane (whom Finch-Lenox fans will know as the future Mrs. Detective) is happily married to a conveniently absent non-character and keeps trying to set Lenox up with her friends; Lenox babysits a little terror and starts yearning for fatherhood, and we all look on benevolently from the future.
I do slightly resent Charles Finch-Lenox for wringing the maximum drama possible out of his low-key characters and then IMMEDIATELY copping out with a series of prequels. Young Lenox is ok (and Graham gets some excellent moments), and I understand it can be hard to write your way back to a cozy equilibrium after you've shaken things up, but I hope we're not stuck in the prequellands for the rest of the series. I miss Team Comfortable.
What I'm Reading Now
Unfortunately, a Finch-Lenox mystery, with its generous margins, large print and short chapters, can only last so long, and then it's back to the irony mines with Thomas Pynchon. Since I hated The Crying of Lot 49 when I read it in college, I guess I was hoping my Pynchon experience would be another Blue Highways or Norman Mailer situation, where my eyes would be opened and I would realize that I loved something I had been reflexively dissing for decades. So far, it hasn't happened. This is a book that requires a tremendous amount of attention. Reading it is like crawling through a thicket of blackberry bushes in the dark. Sometimes you get blackberries, but not very many. Sometimes you hit a clearing and sometimes you hit a wall. There's one impressively bizarre scene in which a guy drops his harmonica down the toilet in a public men's room and dives in after it, somehow wriggling his way through the pipes and wandering through the sewers, nodding to familiar turds - and that's what reading this book feels like at its worst: a herculean effort to enter an inaccessible space in which, after hours in the dark, you may see some shit you recognize.
It's very tiring. I'm not allergic to paying attention. I don't need to understand every single sentence in a book in order to be able to say, "I read that book." But it's tiring. Maybe I'm just distracted and when my schedule is back on track, I'll feel differently. Maybe not.
I started Sophie's Choice - a little further along in the 99 Novels - because I have to give it back to my brother in October and I have no faith in my ability to finish Gravity's Rainbow in time to go in sequence. This is one of the few books on the list I was dreading, but so far it's ok? The grimness and Nazis I was promised have not yet made an appearance. The narrator is a wonderfully self-centered jackass who works in publishing and wants to be a writer - surprise, surprise! He wants you to know that he's aware of how callow and arrogant he was when he wrote them, but he ALSO wants to regale you with his "clever" rejections of various manuscripts. He'd also like to make sure you hear about his sexual fantasies regarding the nice-looking woman next door, which mingle freely with his fantasies of chatting with famous authors. I'm charmed.
What I Plan to Read Next
Who can say? I feel like I'll be stuck in Pynchopolis for a long time.
What I've Finished Reading
I did get a brief break from Gravity's Rainbow when I borrowed the latest Most Comfortable Man in London mystery, The Vanishing Man - a perfectly inoffensive collection of gentle infodumps and stacks of toast. A duke's undistinguished painting is stolen, Finch-Lenox muses on the history of and proper modes of address for the British peerage, Jane (whom Finch-Lenox fans will know as the future Mrs. Detective) is happily married to a conveniently absent non-character and keeps trying to set Lenox up with her friends; Lenox babysits a little terror and starts yearning for fatherhood, and we all look on benevolently from the future.
I do slightly resent Charles Finch-Lenox for wringing the maximum drama possible out of his low-key characters and then IMMEDIATELY copping out with a series of prequels. Young Lenox is ok (and Graham gets some excellent moments), and I understand it can be hard to write your way back to a cozy equilibrium after you've shaken things up, but I hope we're not stuck in the prequellands for the rest of the series. I miss Team Comfortable.
What I'm Reading Now
Unfortunately, a Finch-Lenox mystery, with its generous margins, large print and short chapters, can only last so long, and then it's back to the irony mines with Thomas Pynchon. Since I hated The Crying of Lot 49 when I read it in college, I guess I was hoping my Pynchon experience would be another Blue Highways or Norman Mailer situation, where my eyes would be opened and I would realize that I loved something I had been reflexively dissing for decades. So far, it hasn't happened. This is a book that requires a tremendous amount of attention. Reading it is like crawling through a thicket of blackberry bushes in the dark. Sometimes you get blackberries, but not very many. Sometimes you hit a clearing and sometimes you hit a wall. There's one impressively bizarre scene in which a guy drops his harmonica down the toilet in a public men's room and dives in after it, somehow wriggling his way through the pipes and wandering through the sewers, nodding to familiar turds - and that's what reading this book feels like at its worst: a herculean effort to enter an inaccessible space in which, after hours in the dark, you may see some shit you recognize.
It's very tiring. I'm not allergic to paying attention. I don't need to understand every single sentence in a book in order to be able to say, "I read that book." But it's tiring. Maybe I'm just distracted and when my schedule is back on track, I'll feel differently. Maybe not.
I started Sophie's Choice - a little further along in the 99 Novels - because I have to give it back to my brother in October and I have no faith in my ability to finish Gravity's Rainbow in time to go in sequence. This is one of the few books on the list I was dreading, but so far it's ok? The grimness and Nazis I was promised have not yet made an appearance. The narrator is a wonderfully self-centered jackass who works in publishing and wants to be a writer - surprise, surprise! He wants you to know that he's aware of how callow and arrogant he was when he wrote them, but he ALSO wants to regale you with his "clever" rejections of various manuscripts. He'd also like to make sure you hear about his sexual fantasies regarding the nice-looking woman next door, which mingle freely with his fantasies of chatting with famous authors. I'm charmed.
What I Plan to Read Next
Who can say? I feel like I'll be stuck in Pynchopolis for a long time.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-05 02:18 pm (UTC)And who knows? Maybe I'll even start to like it. Stranger things have happened!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-05 04:39 pm (UTC)Yes, the worst that could happen is the end of the world! :-D
And who knows? Maybe I'll even start to like it. Stranger things have happened!
I admire your plucky optimism. I think at that point, I'd have thrown the book across the room, even if I felt compelled to pick it up again. (Completionism is hard to fight, though I get better at it as life gets visibly shorter.)