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In the Small Whitewashed Church of His Wednesday
What I've Finished Reading
Nothing since Giovanni's Room and The Junior Novel: Its Relationship to Adolescent Reading; I've been busy in a diffuse way.
What I'm Reading Now
So far I don't like Pride of Eden, which has a beautiful cover and a totally infelicitous prose style. It's not even bad necessarily; it's just - blah. Not for me. I don't want it the way some people don't want mayonnaise on a burger. And there are all these scenes like this:
"Used to be lions all over this country, hunting three-toed horses and ground sloths, woolly mammoths."
"You mean saber-toothed tigers?"
"They ain't tigers. They're saber cats. Smilodons. Then you had the American lion, too -- Panthera leo atrax -- four foot tall at the shoulder. Them cats owned the night. 'Course they disappeared at the same time as the rest of the megafauna, ten thousand years ago."
Lope shivered.
"Thank the Lord," he said.
Anse's upper lip curled in sneer.
"They would of ate your Lord off his cross and shat him out in the woods."
Lope stiffened. He thought of the hymns sung in the small whitewashed church of his youth, where his father, a deacon, had often preached on Sundays, his face bright with sweat. Songs of chariots and lion dens and flying away home.
He looked at Anse.
"Not Daniel they didn't. 'God hath set his angel and shut the lions' mouths.'"
Anse smiled at the killed deer.
"Hath he now?"
There are a lot of these thud lines (generally as the final line of a section) and they're constantly jostling with a lot of clause-cluttered first-draft lyricism and not-quite-right metaphors to create the prose equivalent of white noise. Is there anything seriously wrong with it? Probably not. It's just relentlessy unsurprising in every detail. And if I wanted to be relentlessly unsurprised for 300 pages, would I pick up a book about a weirdo wildlife preserve owner with ghostly megafauna all over the cover? I would not.
What I Plan to Read Next
Giovanni's Room definitely stoked my appetite for sad fuckups ruining every life in the vicinity and musing about America, so it's time to read more Baldwin! Unfortunately the libraries are still closed, but fortunately there are a lot of bookstores in the world and many of them deliver. I ordered The Amen Corner from an almost-local bookstore that has temporarily replaced its beautiful tiny office-space location with a bad website. It arrived this afternoon and that's how I found out it's a play. Also on my shelves for the near future: Prairie Fires, something or other about Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Nothing since Giovanni's Room and The Junior Novel: Its Relationship to Adolescent Reading; I've been busy in a diffuse way.
What I'm Reading Now
So far I don't like Pride of Eden, which has a beautiful cover and a totally infelicitous prose style. It's not even bad necessarily; it's just - blah. Not for me. I don't want it the way some people don't want mayonnaise on a burger. And there are all these scenes like this:
"Used to be lions all over this country, hunting three-toed horses and ground sloths, woolly mammoths."
"You mean saber-toothed tigers?"
"They ain't tigers. They're saber cats. Smilodons. Then you had the American lion, too -- Panthera leo atrax -- four foot tall at the shoulder. Them cats owned the night. 'Course they disappeared at the same time as the rest of the megafauna, ten thousand years ago."
Lope shivered.
"Thank the Lord," he said.
Anse's upper lip curled in sneer.
"They would of ate your Lord off his cross and shat him out in the woods."
Lope stiffened. He thought of the hymns sung in the small whitewashed church of his youth, where his father, a deacon, had often preached on Sundays, his face bright with sweat. Songs of chariots and lion dens and flying away home.
He looked at Anse.
"Not Daniel they didn't. 'God hath set his angel and shut the lions' mouths.'"
Anse smiled at the killed deer.
"Hath he now?"
There are a lot of these thud lines (generally as the final line of a section) and they're constantly jostling with a lot of clause-cluttered first-draft lyricism and not-quite-right metaphors to create the prose equivalent of white noise. Is there anything seriously wrong with it? Probably not. It's just relentlessy unsurprising in every detail. And if I wanted to be relentlessly unsurprised for 300 pages, would I pick up a book about a weirdo wildlife preserve owner with ghostly megafauna all over the cover? I would not.
What I Plan to Read Next
Giovanni's Room definitely stoked my appetite for sad fuckups ruining every life in the vicinity and musing about America, so it's time to read more Baldwin! Unfortunately the libraries are still closed, but fortunately there are a lot of bookstores in the world and many of them deliver. I ordered The Amen Corner from an almost-local bookstore that has temporarily replaced its beautiful tiny office-space location with a bad website. It arrived this afternoon and that's how I found out it's a play. Also on my shelves for the near future: Prairie Fires, something or other about Laura Ingalls Wilder.
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On a brighter note! Your copy of The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball went out yesterday, so it should arrive at your doorstep... well, soon hopefully, I don't like to promise too much with the world the way it is these days.
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The cover is very well-chosen for the story Taylor Brown was going for, and I think the story he's going for is ambitious and interesting. I just absolutely can't hang with the writing right now. This may well be my own problem and not his; I've been extra impatient lately.
I'll be very happy to see The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball whenever it arrives!
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Prairie Fires is terribly interesting. Obviously I learned a lot about LIW that wasn't included in her books, but I also felt that I learned a ton about the western US in the last half of the 19th century that I hadn't ever read anywhere else. It's definitely a good read.
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Prairie Fires is so interesting! I started it last night at 10 PM and was a hundred pages in before I remembered I was supposed to sleep.
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If you write more about your Prairie Fires thoughts, I will look forward to reading them!