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Try Not to Make it Weird Wednesday
Jan. 9th, 2019 07:24 amWhat I've Finished Reading
Pale Fire was enjoyable but not memorable. Burgess calls it "a brilliant confection" and that's probably about right. It has all the Nabokovian elements of sarcastically bucolic college town, curmudgeonly opinions on literature, punny names, and wistfully ironic temporal meandering, that you can also find in Pnin, which for my money is funnier and more sustainably funny than Pale Fire (Prof. Pnin gets several name-checks here). This is a book with a great conceit, but once you figure out what's happening - that is, after about the second or third note - there is not much to do but watch it go on happening.
In The Innocent Moon (Book 9 in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, for those of you keeping track) things are getting a bit thready. Phillip Maddison, now in his mid-twenties, spends a lot of time writing in a cottage or arguing with his drunk friends. One of the benefits of a really long novel is that you can get some sense in of the repetitiveness and tedium of real life - which I really do think is a benefit of Williamson's structure most of the time, and not just a sarcastic way of saying I was bored. Phil's career as a writer is not, sadly, as interesting as his career as an unhappy adolescent or a disenchanted soldier, and he is a flatter, shriller, less legible version of himself. Maybe that's just how growing up is sometimes. He has started to bring out a series of books that are obviously a fictionalized version of the earlier books in the Chronicle (and if we could read them, we would eventually find Phil's alter ego Donkin writing thinly fictionalized versions of his own childhood and youth, and so on). Phil spends the last third of the book courting two separate teenagers whose separate mothers are also in love with him, then climbs a mountain and has some failrly uninteresting revelations. In the meantime, there are conversations like this:
( Decay? In MY civilization? )
Anyway, eventually Phil marries one of his teenagers (after some pillow talk about the Viking and Celtic temperaments) and the book ends, so we have another unhappy marriage to look forward to, at least.
What I'm Reading Now
It's here: the last book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series! Appropriately or on-the-nosely enough, it's called Last Things. Lewis Eliot, the narrator (dear writers of all generations, please don't give your characters two first names for a name unless you're going to make some kind of point about it OR you want your readers to spend eleven books forgetting if it is Lewis Eliot or Eliot Lewis) is the father of one grown son and the stepfather of another. He muses about his friends and the young people he knows, has a heart attack, and reflects on mortality and politics in the inimitable C. P. Snow style, i.e., "thoughtful lawyer writes his memoirs, only made up." I know I keep giving C.P. Snow guff for not being a genius, but I'm enjoying this one pretty well.
I meant to take a break from Sue Grafton, but as soon as I got within a hundred feet of a library, I picked up U is for Undertow and started reading. It's ok! I'm not quite as thrilled as Grafton is with her discovery of multiple timelines and POV switching, and I wish she would stop writing sentences like, "As a fat boy, he had no friends to speak of," but that probably won't happen at this point.
What I Plan to Read Next
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (or a long time, anyway), my local university library has the next Henry Williamson book in sequence! As a matter of fact, they have all the later books that Anthony Burgess expects me to skip! So probably that. I might start Synners first - a Cyberpunk Classic if the cover image is any indication.
Pale Fire was enjoyable but not memorable. Burgess calls it "a brilliant confection" and that's probably about right. It has all the Nabokovian elements of sarcastically bucolic college town, curmudgeonly opinions on literature, punny names, and wistfully ironic temporal meandering, that you can also find in Pnin, which for my money is funnier and more sustainably funny than Pale Fire (Prof. Pnin gets several name-checks here). This is a book with a great conceit, but once you figure out what's happening - that is, after about the second or third note - there is not much to do but watch it go on happening.
In The Innocent Moon (Book 9 in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, for those of you keeping track) things are getting a bit thready. Phillip Maddison, now in his mid-twenties, spends a lot of time writing in a cottage or arguing with his drunk friends. One of the benefits of a really long novel is that you can get some sense in of the repetitiveness and tedium of real life - which I really do think is a benefit of Williamson's structure most of the time, and not just a sarcastic way of saying I was bored. Phil's career as a writer is not, sadly, as interesting as his career as an unhappy adolescent or a disenchanted soldier, and he is a flatter, shriller, less legible version of himself. Maybe that's just how growing up is sometimes. He has started to bring out a series of books that are obviously a fictionalized version of the earlier books in the Chronicle (and if we could read them, we would eventually find Phil's alter ego Donkin writing thinly fictionalized versions of his own childhood and youth, and so on). Phil spends the last third of the book courting two separate teenagers whose separate mothers are also in love with him, then climbs a mountain and has some failrly uninteresting revelations. In the meantime, there are conversations like this:
( Decay? In MY civilization? )
Anyway, eventually Phil marries one of his teenagers (after some pillow talk about the Viking and Celtic temperaments) and the book ends, so we have another unhappy marriage to look forward to, at least.
What I'm Reading Now
It's here: the last book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series! Appropriately or on-the-nosely enough, it's called Last Things. Lewis Eliot, the narrator (dear writers of all generations, please don't give your characters two first names for a name unless you're going to make some kind of point about it OR you want your readers to spend eleven books forgetting if it is Lewis Eliot or Eliot Lewis) is the father of one grown son and the stepfather of another. He muses about his friends and the young people he knows, has a heart attack, and reflects on mortality and politics in the inimitable C. P. Snow style, i.e., "thoughtful lawyer writes his memoirs, only made up." I know I keep giving C.P. Snow guff for not being a genius, but I'm enjoying this one pretty well.
I meant to take a break from Sue Grafton, but as soon as I got within a hundred feet of a library, I picked up U is for Undertow and started reading. It's ok! I'm not quite as thrilled as Grafton is with her discovery of multiple timelines and POV switching, and I wish she would stop writing sentences like, "As a fat boy, he had no friends to speak of," but that probably won't happen at this point.
What I Plan to Read Next
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (or a long time, anyway), my local university library has the next Henry Williamson book in sequence! As a matter of fact, they have all the later books that Anthony Burgess expects me to skip! So probably that. I might start Synners first - a Cyberpunk Classic if the cover image is any indication.
