evelyn_b

What I'm No Longer Reading for the Time Being

Last night I was at the bar, complaining about Gravity's Rainbow, and one of my friends said something like, "You know, you can always stop reading a book" -- a true statement about books and one of their most underrated virtues. I tried to explain about the 99 Novels and how I only had twelve left to go and if I made it through 100% of Henry Williamson's Hitler Phase and the egregious slow-mo mudpit merry-go-round that was Giles Goat-Boy then I CERTAINLY was not going to be defeated by Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whom many people actually like! But then I thought about it for a minute and decided that Gravity's Rainbow and I had gotten off on the wrong foot, and the best thing to do was to put it on the shelf for a week or so, read some other things, and try again later. So Gravity's Rainbow has been temporarily replaced by Lanark on my "currently reading" shelf.

What I've Finished Reading

Sophie's Choice was so different from what I expected that I couldn't hate it even if I hated it, which I didn't. It's about the young William Styron (he goes by "Stingo," a boarding-school nickname, for purposes of fictionalization, but beyond that there is no attempt to differentiate him from William Styron, except that one of them is a novelist character in a novel and the other is just a novelist) is fascinated by/in love with his neighbor at the boardinghouse, Sophie, and her brilliant but dangerously unstable boyfriend Nathan, and for a little while they become an inseparable group, going to the beach together and feeding Stingo's imagination with story ideas and dreams of lust. Most of the time, Nathan is exhausting but friendly, but sometimes he becomes violently abusive and irrational. During these episodes, Stingo takes Sophie under his wing, gets her drunk, and hears the true story of her life, which is constantly under revision as if she were - get it? a character in the process of being invented by Stingo. This impression is strengthened by the improbable level of detail indulged in every time there is a blowjob in the story.

In the end, soon after Sophie has revealed or had imagined upon her the whole messy story of her time at Auschwitz, and Stingo's novelistic instinct or possibly real life has forced her into a series of more and more unbearable moral dilemmas, Sophie and Nathan are corralled by the power of revision into a dismal cliche of an ending worthy of our ultra-callow aspiring novelist narrator (or possibly real life, which also runs to annoying cliches). This frees Stingo to muse on the damnable difficulty of it all and to write several books. He reports a resolution made in his diary: "Someday I'll understand Auschwitz," but of course he is never going to understand Auschwitz; he is barely ever going to understand his own horniness, which he is much better at writing about.

In addition to this famous book, there are at least six other books called Sophie's Choice. Most of them are romance or erotica, but one is about a little dog who longs to see the world beyond her backyard.

What I'm Reading Now

My brother sent me an unsolicited biography of Leonardo da Vinci (by Walter Isaacson) along with Sophie's Choice and Gravity's Rainbow - it's ok so far! Physically, it's an odd book, with thick glossy pages (probably chosen for the sake of all the color reproductions), and the author has Opinions About Genius. But so far it's highly relaxing.

Also relaxing is Courting Anna, a historical mystery by Cate Simon about a female lawyer in 1880s Montana who gets mixed up with a charming outlaw. There's not a tremendous amount of tension (though there is a very brief murder mystery!) but it wears its research well and manages to acknowledge both the limitations and the unexpected possibilities of the past without being preachy. And a likable romance hero is a golden rarity for me - I'm sure I've just been reading the wrong books, but there you go. This is the right book. Jeremiah and his partner/best friend from orphanage days are both delightful in a low-key way, and I'm happy to root for them in all their endeavors.


What I Plan to Read Next

Lanark! It's not Gravity's Rainbow, so I'm looking forward to it enormously.

So late that it's Thursday! Oh, well.

What I've Finished Reading

Kristin Lavransdatter! I think on the whole I loved it. ( Cut in case osprey_archer is still reading ) It was tougher than I expected, but I'm no longer sure what I expected.

I was wary of The French Lieutenant's Woman at first because the opening chapter lays it on very thick with the self-aware Victorian scene-setting. I thought, "Oh no, here comes another heaping helping of the author's cleverness." But it grew on me very quickly and so much that I was pulling it out of my bag to read at crosswalks. It is clever and so relentlessly self-aware that it was impossible (even for me, an inveterate sobber over trash) to form an emotional connection to any of the characters. At one point the author flips a coin to determine the course of the plot at a crucial moment, and in the very last chapter he steps onto the scene and turns back his watch in order to replace a guardedly happy ending with a sadder one. Still, I had a good time and resented nothing. I don't know if I'll remember anything about it in three months, but it was highly readable while it lasted. This book also features deliberately bad poetry written by the author on behalf of a protagonist, one of my favorite simple pleasures.

What I'm Reading Now

I just started Gravity's Rainbow, which arrived in the mail the other day. The mass-market paperback edition is VERY EXCITED about Gravity's Rainbow, which is "The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer," according to the front cover. That's a lot of blurb to live up to! I'm not sure yet where it's going but there will certainly be lots of wacky details along the way (also bombs and acronyms).

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Lanark, eventually - and I don't know how I got a copy of The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, but apparently I have one, so I'll probably read it.

What I've Finished Reading

Burgess thinks The Image Men is good satire. I don't know if it is or not because I ran out of patience about 2/3 of the way through. I respect his point about how critics should relax more and not scorn to appreciate big rambling hunks of entertainment with lots of characters and side-currents, but I wound up not appreciating this one. It just keeps lurching around from one episode to the next while the Image Men bilk people but-not-really, drink giant gins, and make speeches. Did you know than in an age of images, people will believe a lot of nonsense about images? It might have made a good ninety-minute movie, but instead it was a book and I got sick of it two hundred pages from the end. This proves that literature is dead, images are the unacknowledged legislators of my brain, and I owe J.B. Priestley $5.

I also finished Giles Goat-Boy, for all the good it did me. Did the entire raised-by-goats idea come about so that John Barth could have the Goat-Boy say, while devouring a valuable religious scroll in a library for important Hero's Journey reasons, that he is "only browsing"? Probably. It's that kind of book.

Cocksure is a fast-moving, rancid, reckless piss-sprinkler of a novel flinging bile-filled condoms in every direction, which made it a welcome break from both of the above. There are a lot of pieces - a Canadian WASP whose friends are all convinced he's Jewish and trying to hide it, an immortal "Star Maker" who turns out to have literally built several stars from scratch Victor Frankenstein-style, a series of publicity-minded murders, a sexually progressive elementary school that puts on a production of "Philosophy in the Bedroom," an ingenue who obeys the rules of screenwriting in all things (in a real-life emergency, she ignores several empty phone booths in favor of the more dramatic one already in use) - all abundantly nasty or eerie or both. None of the pieces ever quite merges with the others to form the coherent shambling abomination you might be hoping for.

What I'm Reading Now

The sixties may come and the sixties may go, but arguably tolerable marriages spring eternal. Kristin Lavransdatter is still fifty acres of thorns in a twenty-acre freehold. I've just finished the second volume, The Wife, and started on the third, The Cross. Kristin and Erlend have just lost their one really good friend, Simon, and are realizing how isolated they've become since Erlend's ill-advised foray into political conspiracy. Meanwhile, time keeps turning their baby boys into teenagers and there's nothing they can do about it.

In my May 1892 issue of Harpers, I found this poem by William Sharp: ( The Three Infinities )


From a mathematical standpoint I'm pretty sure all of these things are technically finite (please correct me if I'm wrong), but that's beside the point.

Meanwhile, Will S. knows his sonnets are stale but you can't make him stop: ( That every word doth almost tell my name )

Maybe novelty is the TRUE staleness, have you thought of that?

What I Plan to Read Next

I asked my brother to send me a few books from his giant collection of slightly musty paperbacks - all 99 novels that are coming up in the sequence, including Gravity's Rainbow and The French Lieutenant's Woman - so when I actually read those will depend on his laziness instead of mine.

What I've Finished Reading

The Stone Raft is the story of how one day the Iberian Peninsula broke away from Europe and went drifting out to sea, to the consternation of many. I liked this premise so much that I bought the book immediately. However, I soon discovered that it was all written like this:

( this woman is pretty after all and I didn't even notice )

If your reaction on reading the above passage was, "Wow! I'd like 300 more pages of the same, please!" then maybe this is the book for you. I'm not sure that it's the book for me, though having written the above paragraph out twice I feel a little more reconciled to it than I did when I started.

In the end the thing I liked most about The Stone Raft was that after the group had been wandering around with a nameless dog for about a hundred pages, one of them thinks that eventually they will have to give the dog a name, "Fathful or Pilot or something," and after that, the dog is occasionally referred to as Faithful and occasionally as Pilot, but more often as Dog or the Dog. At the very end of the book, the travelers decide to name him Constant and he runs off soon after.

What I'm Reading Now

Giles Goat-Boy, by John Barth, whom for decades I have been mixing up, usually in some embarrassing public way, with the not-really-that-similarly-named Roland Barthes, neither of whom I have read. Soon I will be able to keep them straight in my mind, because John Barth will be The One I Read A Book By Once, linked forever with That Book Where Everything Is College and Orgies.

I am looking forward to this added value because, 150 pages in, Giles Goat-Boy is tedious as all get out. I feel bad now for knocking the one-trick-poniness of Pale Fire because at least that was a trick I enjoyed. And once again, I put off reading something too long and got old and crusty. If I'd read Giles Goat-Boy when I was seventeen, fresh off my Tom Robbins phase and hopelessly trying to plough through de Sade out of an obscure sense of obligation, I probably would have thought it was shocking and hilarious, and quoted it obnoxiously at parties. But I'm old, Gandalf. My days go bouncing irretrievably away from me like supermarket bouncy-balls into the storm drains of time. Every second I spend listening to the Goat-Boy hash out how best to take up the mantle of Grand Tutor and lead his benighted pupils through the Finals to Graduation (while saving the campus from a totalitarian computer and the looming threat of an apocalyptic Campus Riot III) is a second I will never be able to spend in any other way. And yet. I haven't written it off, because there's still time for it to grow on me, but I'm not having the rollocking time promised me by the Preface.

What I will say on behalf of Giles Goat-Boy: it isn't fifteen of them.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pavane by Keith Roberts is an alt-history tale of Catholic England, and much shorter than Giles Goat-Boy. I might also try to catch up on some of the books I haven't said anything about yet - and get back on the horse with Kristin Lavransdatter, which I had to leave behind when I left town because it was too large.

What I've Been Reading All This Time, Part 1

I spent the past two weeks miserably trying to plough through The Lockwood Concern, which Anthony Burgess assures me "transcends both the author's declared intention [to write "an old-fashioned morality novel"] and the somewhat melodramatic plot." People kept coming up to me while I was trying to read it and I would say, "It's trash, but I don't know if it's very good trash." I tried to blame myself rather than the book: things had been even more stressful than usual this busy season, so it can't have been O'Hara's fault if I couldn't keep my mind on my leisure. But when I was about three-fourths of the way through The Lockwood Concern, someone handed me a copy of We The Animals by Justin Torres, and my inability to read instantly vanished all at once as if by magic. So maybe it was O'Hara's fault after all. Or maybe I just needed to read a different book.

We The Animals begins beautifully and ends a little weakly (in my admittedly careless experience) but it's short enough and quick enough that you won't necessarily notice.

On the way back home, I also read Like a Fading Shadow by Antonio Muñoz Molina, a perfect traveling book about a guy trying to write a novel and obsessing over James Earl Ray's fugitive days in Lisbon.

I tried to read The Stone Raft by José Saramago after I'd finished, but I'd been totally spoiled by Muñoz Molina's frankness and lucidity and was in no mood for all that Saramagory, so will try again later.

Tomorrow (or Thursday): more books! The busy season is over! I have a lot of catching up to do, in the 99 Novels and elsewhere.

I'm about a million years behind on books I was meaning to read this week, so there is not much to report. I've just barely started A Man of the People and The Luzhin Defense. The latter has this anecdote in the author's introduction:

True, there was a promising flurry in the late thirties when an American publisher showed interest in it, but he turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Luzhin a demented violinist.

When I first read Lolita in my wide-eyed youth, I took Nabokov totally at his word about the publisher who wanted to turn Lo and Humbert into a gaunt boy and gruff farmhand on a blanched prairie landscape with splintery barn in the corner; now I'm beginning to suspect he takes off-hand remarks and embroiders them for laughs, or just makes these American publishers out of whole cloth.

Anyway, Luzhin is not a demented violinist, but a friendless boy who becomes obsessed with chess.

There are some other books in the vicinity, but I'll get to them later, I hope.

What I've Finished Reading

OH MAN you guys. I couldn't remember a thing about why I hated Hatchet before I started reading it, but as soon as I did, it all came crashing back like a needy ghost on the ghost of a motorcycle. It's the writing style. Or, as Gary Paulsen would have it, The Style.

The Style.
( The Style. )

It's not bad. You can read it in a day. The author seems to have some bones to pick with the alienation of man from his environment by technology and civilization. I can't share in this lament because I need my glasses to read it.

I didn't love Station Eleven. In fact, I almost put it down forever when I saw the "reveal" about the identity of the boring creepy survivalist prophet heading toward me in the distance - but it was close enough to the end that I decided to keep going. I don't regret finishing it, but I also don't feel that I got much more out of seeing all the loose ribbons tied up than I would have from leaving them untied, or from spending the same amount of time re-reading an old favorite or staring at a blank wall. That doesn't make this a bad book. Sometimes when I read a book that doesn't "click" with me I put it down to being a bad reader, but I don't think that's the case here. As Marie Kondo might say, some books come into your life to teach you to read a sample before buying.

What I'm Reading Now

I took some books back to the library and picked up three. It was supposed to be just one, but I couldn't remember if Humbolt's Gift or Herzog was the other Saul Bellow book on the 99 Novels list. The third book was an unrelated title that caught my eye as I was looking for Saul Bellow.

Humbolt's Gift is an almost ludicrously easy book for me to love - being a highly digressive Troubled Artist Retrospective narrated by a successful but incredibly hapless writer about and around his dead, difficult poet friend - and I'm sorry to say that as soon as I started reading it, I started neglecting all my other books - Black Spring and The Coup and The Canterbury Tales and all the rest of them. Even Kristin Lavransdatter, to some extent.

However, I'm still making progress in Kristin Lavransdatter, though I think I missed a couple of nights through allowing myself "one more chapter" of Bellow.

( 1396 Bonnie and Clyde )


What I'm Not Reading In Favor of the Trashy TV Version

We've been trying to catch up on Game of Thrones so I can watch the finale in real time. This means Dragons Every Night for the past week or so - we've just started Season 7. I'm relived that ( Spoilers ahoy! )

I'm enjoying it a lot, is what I'm trying to say here. The writing has gotten noticeably worse in some respects, but I don't mind. I'm looking forward to catching up and to a maximally dramatic final season.

What I Plan to Read Next

Once Humbolt's Gift stops demanding all my time and attention, there's the other book I got from the library: When Found Make A Verse of by Helen Bevington. Apparently, it's poems! After that, I'm not sure. I decided to go ahead and order the missing 99 Novels from 1964, so those should be arriving soon.

What I've Finished Reading

Late Call by Angus Wilson. I was a little worried about this 99 Novels selection because Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo was one of the few 99 Novels that left me cold - but I liked this one a lot. The satire is much more down to earth, and kinder - it's about an old woman retiring to live with her son in a postwar New Town, with her difficult, charming, poisonously bitter old husband and his resentments, and her son's resentments and his grown-up children's, and all her own memories crowded together in a modern house with intimidatingly self-sufficient stove and washing machine.

I mentioned Frankenstein last week, and my thoughts on it are not deep nor have they changed much: Victor Frankenstein is a world-class idiot who can bring life to lifeless matter through science! and decides that the best use of this incredible new technology is OBVIOUSLY "build a guy from scratch!" but apparently never counted on having to make any other decisions with regard to his shambling emo teen creation. As soon as the creature opens his earnest, innocent, love-seeking eyes, Victor runs off to have a nervous breakdown about how (totally unexpectedly!) hideous his creature turned out to be. Victor, maybe you should have prepared for this moment by building a slightly larger than average frog first? Or something? He also can't figure out that "see you on your wedding night, sucker!!" might constitute a threat to anyone but himself, even though the monster has just painstakingly explained that his vengeance M.O. is "kill everyone Victor cares about." He decides that this threat means that the creature is going to kill him on his wedding night, and then it'll all be over! So obviously he has to get married as soon as possible so his fiance will be safe forever! Victor is the stupidest mad scientist.

Victor's creature is an instant classic and I love him. He gets carelessly knocked into life by a total doofus and has to fend for himself, a stranger and afraid in a world he never made, and damn it, he does the best he can. Anyone whose introduction to human emotion is The Sorrows of Young Werther is bound to experience some social difficulties, even setting aside the whole "giant reanimated corpse patchwork" aspect of things. Ok, so you shouldn't kill innocent people, even if you have a legitimate beef with your creator and are feeling legitimately betrayed by humanity. But it's hard not to feel for him just the same. Is he the grandfather of all sad monsters? I don't know enough about sad monster history to be sure, but he's a memorable one.

I feel like I must have read Frankenstein at some point, possibly in high school when I read a lot of things I forgot immediately after. At least, I experienced a lot of deja vu while reading - which might just be free-floating Frankenstein cultural osmosis. I wasn't keeping a reading log back then so there's no way to know for sure.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm in the middle of U.P. by R.A. Riekki, which is a fantastic book about scrubby angry-bored inchoate-longing-addled teenage boys in the late-eighties Upper Penninsula of Michigan, and just picked up Black Spring by Henry Miller (a used bookstore acquisition driven by my pledge to finally read Henry Miller) whose first chapter about growing up in Brooklyn dovetails perfectly with the concerns of U.P. in spite of vast distances in time and space and degree of urbanization:

The boys you worshipped when you first came down into the street remain with you all your life. They are the only real heroes. Napoleon, Lenin, Capone -- all fiction. Napoleon is nothing to me in comparison with Eddie Carney, who gave me my first black eye [. . . ] All these boys of the Fourteenth Ward have a flavor about them still. They were not invented or imagined: they were real. Their names ring out like gold coins -- Tom Fowler, Jim Buckley, Matt Owen, Rob Ramsay, Harry Martin, Johnny Dunne, to say nothing of Eddie Carney or the great Lester Reardon. Why, even now when I say Johnny Paul the names of the saints leave a bad taste in my mouth. Johnny Paul was the living Odyssey of the Fourteenth Ward; that he later became a truck driver is an irrelevant fact.

I'm also reading The Spire by William Golding, about a bunch of medieval sinners building a cathedral to no avail - actually re-reading, because William Golding is too damn subtle for me; I got halfway through and realized I had missed 9/10 of the innuendos.

Also, Kristin Lavransdatter! ( under the cut )

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm going out of town this weekend, and as usual when I go out of town I get ambitious and pack a lot of books, thinking I'll have more free time than I do. This time I've got ten. One of them is Kristin Lavransdatter. Tuck Everlasting and Light in August are in the pile along with some reference-y books about the past, and The Canterbury Tales. We'll see what I end up reading.

Sadly, neither The Defence by V. Nabokov nor Heartland by Wilson Harris are available at the local library, so I'll either have to buy them or ILL it if I want to continue my 99 Novels in chronological order.

What I've Finished Reading

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul and The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard, both 99 Novels for 1979, both extremely well-written on a sentence level, and very different from one another.

A Bend in the River is tough and ambiguous. The bend in the river is a long way inland, in an unnamed East African country a little after independence. There is an unnamed strong-man president (unnamed and fictional, but wearing Mobutu Sese Seko's hat) who starts distant and stays distant, but grows larger and more omnious over time. We don't see anything except through the eyes of Salim, a youngish ethnically Indian merchant from a trader family on the coast. Salim takes over the business in the town at the bend in the river from a family friend, after a long rickety journey by road. He sells tubs and other useful objects to villagers further inland, acquires some responsibilities he doesn't want, and becomes briefly insider-adjacent when a successful neighbor from the costal city comes to town and introduces him to some prominent Europeans in the new regime (Salim has a dismal affair with one of them). The insiders become outsiders, the new president's initatives turn strange and cultic, the disbanded youth coalition reorganizes itself as a liberation army, and finally Salim is forced to leave town on a barge in the dark, for an unknown future.

Salim isn't necessarily someone you love - the opening sentence of this book is a masterpiece of deliberately alienating the reader from the outset - but I found him impressively convincing as a literate but resolutely non-"literary" narrator, whose education has been strictly buisiness-focused and whose approach to life is defensively pragmatic and head-down, who is nevertheless made entirely from only the strongest Late Twentieth Century Realism prose. That trick in itself is worth seeing.

About The Unlimited Dream Company, I'm not sure what to say except: you should read it. It's short, so it won't take very long. It's trippy and fleshily ugly and bizarrely lucid. If you are prone to worrying about what books are for, you might think, "What is this even for?" But if you keep reading you will find that this question answers itself. If your town is ever struck by a plague of insomnia, you can distribute this book as a substitute dream, which was very magnanimous of J.G. Ballard if you think about it.

The Girl With the Silver Eyes (by Willo Davis Robertson) is one of those books I had a very clear memory of seeing in the library as a child, and never got around to reading though I may have written some fanfiction about it in my head. I saw it at the used bookstore a few weeks ago and thought, why not? It's ok. I never really warmed to it. There are lots of easily confused adult characters (compounded by POV character Katie's policy of only ever learning anyone's initials) and plenty of fat shaming. If you want to find out how to conduct a private investigation as a nine-year-old in 1985, it's a decent sourcebook. As an adult reader, I thought the depressing apartment complex was nicely drawn, but I suspect I wouldn't have picked up on its subtle miseries if I'd read it when I was the target audience.

What I'm Reading Now

Imagine my delight when I came across a reference to the Rover Boys in An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth! (he read bad translations of Dostoevsky the way other kids read the Rover Boys). I was pleased to see evidence that Arthur M. Winfield's hapless brotopia made an impression, even if it was only a negative one. Rexroth's book so far is a breezy, chatty, cranky treat, full of eccentric Midwestern details. The book was entirely dictated, according to the introduction, and reading it is exactly like being reminisced to at length by an anarchist of a certain age - a great talker and a great grump. He is constantly assuring his reader-listeners that even at the age of [six, nine, fourteen] he could clearly sense that [popular artist or aesthetic theory] was shallow mendacious trash. As someone chronically brimming with popular opinions, who even in middle age finds it impossible to tell for sure what's trash and what isn't, I find this confident iconoclasm charming.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've stumbled on one of those free library birdhouses about a mile from my apartment, and the selection is AMAZING. I took Light in August, Tuck Everlasting, a genuine Harlequin Romance called Just A Normal Marriage (I mistook it for a historical, but was TRICKED by the 1980s puffed-sleeve-and-pompadour revival), Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Uncorrected Proof, Not For Sale) and The King Must Die by Mary Renault. I left an issue of Poetry, a couple of mysteries, Invisible Cities, and The Unlimited Dream Company.

Also, osprey_archer - do you want to start Kristin Lavransdatter sometime this weekend? Say the word!

What I've Finished Reading

Every time I think the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight has finally mercifully abandoned the politics angle and settled down to a nice relaxing round of farming and moping, Phil throws in another soppy Hitler aside, just so you don't forget whose book you're reading. So about a third of the way through Lucifer Before Sunrise, as the introduction to a sweeping description of literal floods in England, we get "The great spring-tide of human movement that was Adolf Hitler's heart and brain striving to create unity in a fragmentated continent seemed at last to have lapped itself to stillness: the moment when a scarce perceptive tremor passes through the immense sheet of water that is a tidal flow; when silently, almost stealthily, it begins to lapse." That is a reasonably representative example of HW's writing style in general and the sort of tone he wants to take about his totally well-meaning fallen angel Hitler in particular. He might have done all right in the nineteenth century, writing great-man nonsense about Napoleon - at least, present-day readers would be willing to cut him more slack about it. I'm not convinced that he would have felt any more at home back then than he does in 1943 or 1967.

Near the end of the book, Phil's penchant for excessive and inappropriate Hitler quoting is brought in as evidence for his wife Lucy's divorce suit. I laughed, I cried. Mostly I laughed. The divorce is a blessing in disguise because it allows Phil to give up trying to build a functioning farm for his family to inherit and go live in a cottage and try to write an important novel about "the age" and how hard farming is, like he's always wanted.


What I'm Reading Now

The world of books is wide and also includes Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Had 14 Tales, which is 14 short, light stories about cats solving mysteries by being cats, as well as killing a few people here and there for great cat justice. I never finished the one Lillian Jackson Braun cat mystery I tried to read (several years ago) because I disliked the human POV guy too intensely and couldn't handle all his conversations eventually being about cats. The stories here worked much better for me: either they're told from the POV of a cat or they're short anecdotes about memorable cats, so there's no suffocating feeling of cats and cat jokes being forced into normally cat-free situations in order to provide a cat connection on every page. This collection was published in 1988, but about half the stories in it were first printed in the 1960s, so as well as being light-hearted fun it's also a small catalog of changing attitudes in cat ownership. (There is also a fantastically stupid joke about cat yuppies).

The world of books also includes the ENORMOUS last volume of Joseph Frank's five-volume Dostoevsky biography and Elsie Disnmore - which I've decided to give another try in book form, now that I've been baptized in the cheesy fire of Elise's Girlhood. It's easy to see why this book attracted so much derision and also why it was such a hit with a subset of young readers. Elsie suffers endlessly from being pretty, which she can't help at all, and talented, which means she is always being crushed between the hideous embarrassment of performing and the unbearable shame of not being able to perform. Her father, Horace, is a ridiculously hapless young monster who keeps willfully misunderstanding Elsie and resenting her for it. Everything is incredibly over the top humiliation and despair, and the whole book is a machine designed to crush Elsie's little world over and over. In the scene I just read, Elsie would really like to hug her father, but he just withdrew his arm and picked up the paper! And just as she's standing there, making up her mind to do it anyway (but terrified of rejection), her bratty same-age aunt Enna skips in and demands a kiss, and Horace is all, "At least one of you actually likes me and isn't afraid of me!" while Elsie just stands there dying of misery. Let's be honest: if this book had been available to me when I was Elsie's age (and if I hadn't grown up with a later generation of Elsie-disdainers writing children's fiction), I would have read it over and over again. It's a sugar-frosted banquet of cruelty.

One of Emma Dunning Banks' shorter recitations sums up the Elsie experience nicely:

( The Lesson of Obedience )

What I Plan to Read Next

Amid tidal pools and title drops, the days of Phillip Maddison upon the earth are trickling toward their end. The Gale of the World is the LAST EVER book in the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence and the book I am about to read next. Will Phil finally begin his Great Work? Will he find the courage to write down all the thoughts that have been howling lyrically through his soul for the past 5800 pages? Will he create an infintely intensifying vortex of ever-more-thinly fictionalized autobiography that DESTROYS CIVILIZATION? Find out next week right here on What the Hell Am I Reading Wednesday!

(but if the last line of The Gale of the World is the first line of The Dark Lantern, there will be no more Reading Wednesdays because I will DIE).