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Wednesday Always Comes Too Late
Sep. 26th, 2019 04:19 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
Near the end of Courting Anna, I found myself checking the remaining pages and wondering how on earth they were going to arrange things so that Anna and her charming ex-outlaw were going to end up together. There were so few pages left at one point that I began to worry that I was reading some kind of genre-bending romance in which learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. But I was a fool to doubt; Courting Anna isn't that kind of book at all, and the ending is perfectly satisfying. I wouldn't mind reading a sequel.
Lanark was fantastic and I finished it in just a few days; I was probably a little propelled by my disappointment in Gravity's Rainbow because Lanark provides the cynical twentieth-century hellscape goodness I was hoping for with none of the accompanying realtime discomfort of getting my jaws stuck together in the overzealous taffy of Thomas Pynchon's prose. Lanark is, according to its subtitle, "a life in four books;" it begins with Book Three in a confusing subterranean city where people keep disappearing and/or turning into reptiles or slugs, and follows Lanark through a cannibalistic NHS facility to an oracle who helpfully fills him in on his beforelife as a melancholy Portrait of the Artist as a Sad Young Masturbator. Later, back in the underworld, he manages to get an audience with his very unhelpful author (in a chapter called "Epilogue" that is followed by chapters called "Climax," "Catastrophe," and "End." Like Goethe's Faust, though not quite as much, this is a book that took a long time to write, so Lanark is constantly having to walk through timeless zones that age him unpredictably, missing his son's childhood, and losing what little context he had in the first place. Alasdair Gray's publishers tried to get him to publish it as two separate books, the fantasy hellscape in one and the regular sadscape in the other, but he insisted on jamming them together and I'm glad he did. It jars beautifully.
Sweet Dreams by Michael Frayn went by in less a day, but it has the excuse that it's extremely short and has no chapter breaks. It's also an oddly apt companion to Lanark: a perky satirical heaven where everyone is doing their level best to be extremely well-meaning about the whole suffering and death thing and that's got to count for something, doesn't it?
The Paying Guests is a nicely paced crime novel by Sarah Waters that is good right up til the end, where it fizzled out a little (for me; I don't know how it'll play for others). This one had a blurb from NPR calling it "one of the most sensual [novels] you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a 'G' rating." I don't know about good taste, but feel I should warn you that this novel does not qualify for a G rating, and that the NPR critic would have to have skimmed about a hundred pages very rapidly in order to think it did.
A Journey to Ohio in 1810 as Recorded by Margaret Van Horn Dwight is not one of the 99 Novels, but a journal of about forty pages by the twenty-year-old Dwight, first published in 1912 and reprinted in the 90s to give it an ISBN. It's wonderfully lively and funny, full of complaints and prejudiced descriptions of rustics and bad roads.
What I'm Reading Now
Since I've been thoroughly refreshed by Lanark and all the other books that aren't Gravity's Rainbow it's time to try again with Gravity's Rainbow. I decided to start over at the beginning. I'm going much slower and reading out loud when it gets extra dense, and so far I don't love it but I don't hate it yet, either.
What I Plan to Read Next
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury (for 99 Novels), probably something else.
Near the end of Courting Anna, I found myself checking the remaining pages and wondering how on earth they were going to arrange things so that Anna and her charming ex-outlaw were going to end up together. There were so few pages left at one point that I began to worry that I was reading some kind of genre-bending romance in which learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. But I was a fool to doubt; Courting Anna isn't that kind of book at all, and the ending is perfectly satisfying. I wouldn't mind reading a sequel.
Lanark was fantastic and I finished it in just a few days; I was probably a little propelled by my disappointment in Gravity's Rainbow because Lanark provides the cynical twentieth-century hellscape goodness I was hoping for with none of the accompanying realtime discomfort of getting my jaws stuck together in the overzealous taffy of Thomas Pynchon's prose. Lanark is, according to its subtitle, "a life in four books;" it begins with Book Three in a confusing subterranean city where people keep disappearing and/or turning into reptiles or slugs, and follows Lanark through a cannibalistic NHS facility to an oracle who helpfully fills him in on his beforelife as a melancholy Portrait of the Artist as a Sad Young Masturbator. Later, back in the underworld, he manages to get an audience with his very unhelpful author (in a chapter called "Epilogue" that is followed by chapters called "Climax," "Catastrophe," and "End." Like Goethe's Faust, though not quite as much, this is a book that took a long time to write, so Lanark is constantly having to walk through timeless zones that age him unpredictably, missing his son's childhood, and losing what little context he had in the first place. Alasdair Gray's publishers tried to get him to publish it as two separate books, the fantasy hellscape in one and the regular sadscape in the other, but he insisted on jamming them together and I'm glad he did. It jars beautifully.
Sweet Dreams by Michael Frayn went by in less a day, but it has the excuse that it's extremely short and has no chapter breaks. It's also an oddly apt companion to Lanark: a perky satirical heaven where everyone is doing their level best to be extremely well-meaning about the whole suffering and death thing and that's got to count for something, doesn't it?
The Paying Guests is a nicely paced crime novel by Sarah Waters that is good right up til the end, where it fizzled out a little (for me; I don't know how it'll play for others). This one had a blurb from NPR calling it "one of the most sensual [novels] you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a 'G' rating." I don't know about good taste, but feel I should warn you that this novel does not qualify for a G rating, and that the NPR critic would have to have skimmed about a hundred pages very rapidly in order to think it did.
A Journey to Ohio in 1810 as Recorded by Margaret Van Horn Dwight is not one of the 99 Novels, but a journal of about forty pages by the twenty-year-old Dwight, first published in 1912 and reprinted in the 90s to give it an ISBN. It's wonderfully lively and funny, full of complaints and prejudiced descriptions of rustics and bad roads.
What I'm Reading Now
Since I've been thoroughly refreshed by Lanark and all the other books that aren't Gravity's Rainbow it's time to try again with Gravity's Rainbow. I decided to start over at the beginning. I'm going much slower and reading out loud when it gets extra dense, and so far I don't love it but I don't hate it yet, either.
What I Plan to Read Next
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury (for 99 Novels), probably something else.
