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What I've Finished Reading
10:04 grew on me, even though I spent nearly every page thinking it was too cute for me, probably mainly because it has a good sense of place and don't mind hating a narrator. In fact, it's very hard for me to resent a fictional character the way I would resent a real person who tried to tell me all about octopus intelligence and how delicious those baby octopuses were in the same sentence. 10:04 has "A Novel" right on the cover, even though Meta-Ben deliberately spends a great deal of time blurring the lines between himself and author Ben Lerner and then elbowing me in the ribs about it. What you end up with is a little bit of Occupy Wall Street, a little bit of Hurricane Sandy, and a lot of anxious chewing on the gristle of time and squinting at the unimaginable future, plus some New York Writing Life details that would sound like outdated aspirational fantasy if I didn't already know that Ben Lerner is a real and successful author. It wasn't my thing, but it mostly worked anyway. I may even read more of Meta-Ben's Late Capitalist Adventures, but probably only if they fall directly into my lap like this one did.
What I'm Reading Now
The Quality of Hurt is Volume 1 of Chester Himes' two-part autobiography; the second part is called My Life of Absurdity, which is the title that drew me to both at the used book store. In Volume 1, the word "hurt" recurs over and over again. I expect him to do the same thing with "absurdity" in Vol II. Himes is frank to the point of flatness, and completely unapologetic, about his fairly nasty attitudes and occasional violence toward women, as well as a lot of other bad decisions both sympathetic and opaque. That said, I'm finiding it extremely readable - it presents all the impenetrable confusion of day-to-day life in an incongruously lucid style. Himes is as addicted to sweeping statements about massive categories of people as he is defensive of his own individuality, but his assessment of "the American black" makes an accurate enough description of himself: "complex, intriguing, and not particularly likable." I'm enjoying his totally unromantic account of an endlessly circular and petty expatriate Paris (circa 1955), and he manages to get a tremendous amount of writing done in between drunken altercations, decaying friendships, and car accidents.
The university library is now open to the mask-wearing public, with caution tape wrapped around some of the chairs and the adopt-a-book shelf repurposed as a pickup station for no-contact book requests - so I got a couple of library books for the first time since March. One of them is What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer. I've decided that the best medicine for my recurring election-year anxiety is a balls-to-the-wall gonzo hot tub party of a book about an election year that is safely in the past.
What it Takes begins in 1986 and follows George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, and Michael Dukakis through biographical flashbacks and into the presidential primaries and election of 1988. Cramer explains in the introduction how he followed these guys around and did about a million interviews in order to bolster his case for what still feels like a completely unearned assumption of intimacy, in which he follows each candidate around in a close-third pseudo-internal monologue in an approximation of the candidate's speaking style. He'd also originally meant to include Jesse Jackson but left him out in the end because he didn't feel he'd established enough rapport. This was a little disappointing to me as a reader, but also probably just as well.
I suspect I wouldn't enjoy this approach at all if I were reading a book about the present (either similarly-constructed monologues about present-day politicians, or if I somehow slipped back in time to 1988 to read the originals in Esquire) but from thirty-plus years in the future, it's like reading a really jumpy novel by a wannabe Tolstoy, and just what the doctor ordered.
What I Plan to Read Next
The other book I got from the library is called Forty-One False Starts and was a drive-by recommendation from Granta. I also pulled Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming out of the Larger Free Library because I had an incredibly petty grudge against Dicey's Song back in my Scholastic Book Fair days and never subsequently gave Cynthia Voigt a second chance.
10:04 grew on me, even though I spent nearly every page thinking it was too cute for me, probably mainly because it has a good sense of place and don't mind hating a narrator. In fact, it's very hard for me to resent a fictional character the way I would resent a real person who tried to tell me all about octopus intelligence and how delicious those baby octopuses were in the same sentence. 10:04 has "A Novel" right on the cover, even though Meta-Ben deliberately spends a great deal of time blurring the lines between himself and author Ben Lerner and then elbowing me in the ribs about it. What you end up with is a little bit of Occupy Wall Street, a little bit of Hurricane Sandy, and a lot of anxious chewing on the gristle of time and squinting at the unimaginable future, plus some New York Writing Life details that would sound like outdated aspirational fantasy if I didn't already know that Ben Lerner is a real and successful author. It wasn't my thing, but it mostly worked anyway. I may even read more of Meta-Ben's Late Capitalist Adventures, but probably only if they fall directly into my lap like this one did.
What I'm Reading Now
The Quality of Hurt is Volume 1 of Chester Himes' two-part autobiography; the second part is called My Life of Absurdity, which is the title that drew me to both at the used book store. In Volume 1, the word "hurt" recurs over and over again. I expect him to do the same thing with "absurdity" in Vol II. Himes is frank to the point of flatness, and completely unapologetic, about his fairly nasty attitudes and occasional violence toward women, as well as a lot of other bad decisions both sympathetic and opaque. That said, I'm finiding it extremely readable - it presents all the impenetrable confusion of day-to-day life in an incongruously lucid style. Himes is as addicted to sweeping statements about massive categories of people as he is defensive of his own individuality, but his assessment of "the American black" makes an accurate enough description of himself: "complex, intriguing, and not particularly likable." I'm enjoying his totally unromantic account of an endlessly circular and petty expatriate Paris (circa 1955), and he manages to get a tremendous amount of writing done in between drunken altercations, decaying friendships, and car accidents.
The university library is now open to the mask-wearing public, with caution tape wrapped around some of the chairs and the adopt-a-book shelf repurposed as a pickup station for no-contact book requests - so I got a couple of library books for the first time since March. One of them is What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer. I've decided that the best medicine for my recurring election-year anxiety is a balls-to-the-wall gonzo hot tub party of a book about an election year that is safely in the past.
What it Takes begins in 1986 and follows George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, and Michael Dukakis through biographical flashbacks and into the presidential primaries and election of 1988. Cramer explains in the introduction how he followed these guys around and did about a million interviews in order to bolster his case for what still feels like a completely unearned assumption of intimacy, in which he follows each candidate around in a close-third pseudo-internal monologue in an approximation of the candidate's speaking style. He'd also originally meant to include Jesse Jackson but left him out in the end because he didn't feel he'd established enough rapport. This was a little disappointing to me as a reader, but also probably just as well.
I suspect I wouldn't enjoy this approach at all if I were reading a book about the present (either similarly-constructed monologues about present-day politicians, or if I somehow slipped back in time to 1988 to read the originals in Esquire) but from thirty-plus years in the future, it's like reading a really jumpy novel by a wannabe Tolstoy, and just what the doctor ordered.
What I Plan to Read Next
The other book I got from the library is called Forty-One False Starts and was a drive-by recommendation from Granta. I also pulled Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming out of the Larger Free Library because I had an incredibly petty grudge against Dicey's Song back in my Scholastic Book Fair days and never subsequently gave Cynthia Voigt a second chance.
