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What I've Finished Reading
Humbolt's Gift is easy to summarize in a sentence (washed-up ex-wunderkind bequeaths to his embarrassingly successful but rapidly money-hemorrhaging friend the nutty movie scenario they cooked up together one drunken night when they were both still young and golden), but hard to describe. The reasons why Charlie Citrine, the embarassingly successful writer-narrator, is hemorrhaging money form several tide pools of comically demoralizing drama, each with its own thriving drama ecosystem. Bellow combines beautifully sturdy paragraphs, the elite athletes of the paragraph world, with meandering, unwieldy plots - a perfect combination if you're me.
Black Spring continues to be a weird-ass book of uncertain category (Wikipedia calls it a novel, which I guess is fair enough), with lots of quasi-Joycean stand-up-comic logic and an eccentric blend of Real Gross Nasty True Life Grittiness and pure fantasy. Sometimes he hits a splendid ranty stride, and for a moment you're nodding along as if to music, and then suddenly he'll skid off in another direction about the true nature of mankind or something, and you can almost hear the record scratch inside your head.
If you want to listen to Henry Miller reading HIS OWN WORDS in exactly the voice you would expect him to have (a pleasantly crusty midcentury New Yorker with some distinctive vocal tics,) there's loads of audio over on Ubuweb Sound: http://www.ubu.com/sound/miller.html - also thanks to Wikipedia.
What I'm Reading Now
I really can't tell if The Coup is a failed experiment that's slowly growing on me or a successful one I'm not keen on. Updike's put on the extra-florid costume of a fictional African dictator (who once studied in Wisconsin) in order to make Updikean jabs at American consumerism and cultural imperialism from a fresh angle, and giving himself an excuse to be maximally indulgent in his prose style, with more decorative curlicues than suburban Pennsylvania allows. It's lushly satirical but seldom actually funny, at least for me, as the work of macheteing through the metaphors is too tiring. Do I like it? I still don't know.
In Kristin Lavransdattar I've just finished Chapter 5 of Book II (The Wife), and. . . Erlend did something considerate! Can you believe it? Of course he did plenty of inconsiderate things before then and probably after, but check it out:
( Erlend's Big Moment )
This book keeps getting better, but I suspect the marriage of Kristin and Erlend will get a little worse.
What I Plan to Read Next
I've given myself too much of a backlog, so beyond the 99 Novels, I'm not sure. The two that I ordered haven't arrived yet, but I have a couple more from the library: Man of the People by Chinua Achebe and The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark.
Humbolt's Gift is easy to summarize in a sentence (washed-up ex-wunderkind bequeaths to his embarrassingly successful but rapidly money-hemorrhaging friend the nutty movie scenario they cooked up together one drunken night when they were both still young and golden), but hard to describe. The reasons why Charlie Citrine, the embarassingly successful writer-narrator, is hemorrhaging money form several tide pools of comically demoralizing drama, each with its own thriving drama ecosystem. Bellow combines beautifully sturdy paragraphs, the elite athletes of the paragraph world, with meandering, unwieldy plots - a perfect combination if you're me.
Black Spring continues to be a weird-ass book of uncertain category (Wikipedia calls it a novel, which I guess is fair enough), with lots of quasi-Joycean stand-up-comic logic and an eccentric blend of Real Gross Nasty True Life Grittiness and pure fantasy. Sometimes he hits a splendid ranty stride, and for a moment you're nodding along as if to music, and then suddenly he'll skid off in another direction about the true nature of mankind or something, and you can almost hear the record scratch inside your head.
If you want to listen to Henry Miller reading HIS OWN WORDS in exactly the voice you would expect him to have (a pleasantly crusty midcentury New Yorker with some distinctive vocal tics,) there's loads of audio over on Ubuweb Sound: http://www.ubu.com/sound/miller.html - also thanks to Wikipedia.
What I'm Reading Now
I really can't tell if The Coup is a failed experiment that's slowly growing on me or a successful one I'm not keen on. Updike's put on the extra-florid costume of a fictional African dictator (who once studied in Wisconsin) in order to make Updikean jabs at American consumerism and cultural imperialism from a fresh angle, and giving himself an excuse to be maximally indulgent in his prose style, with more decorative curlicues than suburban Pennsylvania allows. It's lushly satirical but seldom actually funny, at least for me, as the work of macheteing through the metaphors is too tiring. Do I like it? I still don't know.
In Kristin Lavransdattar I've just finished Chapter 5 of Book II (The Wife), and. . . Erlend did something considerate! Can you believe it? Of course he did plenty of inconsiderate things before then and probably after, but check it out:
( Erlend's Big Moment )
This book keeps getting better, but I suspect the marriage of Kristin and Erlend will get a little worse.
What I Plan to Read Next
I've given myself too much of a backlog, so beyond the 99 Novels, I'm not sure. The two that I ordered haven't arrived yet, but I have a couple more from the library: Man of the People by Chinua Achebe and The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark.
