evelyn_b

What I've Finished Reading

I've mentioned before that I'm trying to pare down my personal book collection, but long ago reached the point where all the books I still had were books I wanted to read before giving away. Since I finished the 99 Novels, I've mostly just been marching through them in the order in which they appear on my bookshelves. Some of them are not really books at all, but pamphlets or journals that I bought because they looked interesting and/or were about to be thrown out.

( A few journals behind the cut )

Helen of Troy was completely fine all the way through. It packs in a lot of Easter eggs from miscellaneous Helen lore, including the Marvel-retcon-esque claim put forth by some ancient authors that actually Paris took a facsimile of Helen to Troy and the real Helen was teleported to Egypt to wait out the war in perfect innocence, poor lamb. The novel has Menelaus and Helen more or less reconciling while they're stuck in Egypt, which prompts Menelaus (a perennialy flailing sadsack in this version) to say wistfully that sometimes he feels as if the real Helen was here all along, waiting for him. The novel helpfully provides her with a smart friend who knows all about potions, so when Paris dies and she's married off to a less attractive son of Priam, he gives her a magical serum to render the guy permanently impotent so she can just chill. Within the moral world of the Iliad, I would worry that this kind of meddling would have dire consequences possibly involving angry gods, but this book is from 2006 so it just works seamlessly after about 90 seconds of pawing and so much for him. I'm not sure I could be totally satisfied with a first-person Helen story; I definitely wasn't with the specific choices this one made, but I still enjoyed it.

What I've Discarded With Zero Compunctions

For years I'd had this big book called The Michaels Book of Paper Crafts that I'd picked up somewhere for cheap, waiting around for the day when I would want to try something new. The other day I decided I might as well try some papier mache, but it had been about 30 years and I couldn't remember how to make the gluey bath. I got out my Michaels Book of Paper Crafts, flipped to the index, and found the instructions, which were "buy a bag of prepared papier-mache mix at Michaels." I skimmed the rest of the book to see if there were any other suggestions for doing this extremely basic first-grade activity from scratch. There were none.

I understand that Michaels is a store and this book was probably an attempt to drum up business with attractive pictures, but not providing a simple recipe for papier mache in a book this size with "Paper Crafts" in the title is a serious dereliction as far as I'm concerned. For its sins, this book will be turned into a paper craft.

What I'm Reading Now

Edisto by Padgett Powell is a little overly precious and colorful, but I don't dislike it. The narrator is a twelve-year-old whose eccentric mother foists a lot of unnecessary reading on him so he can develop into a writer. This premise allows the actual writer of the book to indulge in flights of precociousness and innocence without troubling to curb his vocabulary. The surroundings are Extreme Southern Costal Decay.

I should also mention that about a third of the way into Part II of Don Quixote, Quixote and Sancho meet a couple of deranged Don Quixote fans, a duke and duchess, who invite them to stay at their home and are now arranging a series of fake adventures for them, including granting Sancho a fake island to govern with a fake health-craze chef to deprive him of food (and telling his wife all about his new status so that she can show up and get laughed at too), and dropping a bag of live cats on Quixote's head (which they didn't expect to claw him up quite as badly as they did, so they feel a little sorry, but not sorry enough to stop contriving new Squire of Gothos bullshit to snicker at). This setup, the contrived adventures, and the constant chuckling of the Duke and Duchess and their friends are excruciatingly annoying, but every time I have occasion to think this, which is nearly every page these days, I have to also think, "Well, what's the difference between Cervantes contriving non-adventures for Quixote in the 'real' world that invariably end in someone punching him, and these fictional INSUFFERABLE CHOADS contriving comparatively safer adventures, with the potential for a satisfying artificial conclusion, in a controlled environment for their own amusement?" and feel strongly if vaguely that I am being trolled from the distant past.

What I Plan to Read Next

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, and probably some other things.

What I've Finished Reading

The Amen Corner, a play by James Baldwin about an ambitious woman preacher who gets backstabbed by her own congregation in a somewhat unpleasantly gendered way. As a play, it doesn't get to partake nearly enough of the gorgeous/vicious prose you've come to expect from a book with "James Baldwin" on the cover, but it does get to indulge in tremendous suffocating waves of Church Talk, for which Baldwin (atheist preacher's kid and ex-junior minister) has a sharp, appreciative, and unkindly ear.

I was a little less than thrilled with the latest Most Comfortable Man in London mystery, The Last Passenger, so it was either the wrong time or the only time for me to read Charles Finch's Serious Oxford Novel, The Last Enchantments. I couldn't resist taking it home from the new Larger Free Library, even though (or, to be honest, because) I knew perfectly well it was going to be bad. Unfortunately, it wasn't the fun kind of bad, just harmless and boring.

The narrator is a sensitive young non-detective, disappointingly not also named "Charles," who is taking a break from Yale and electoral politics after the disappointing 2004 election to do study abroad at Oxford (the English one). Everyone talks more or less like the sedate Victorians of Team Comfortable only with contemporary expletives and sex tourism jokes poked in from time to time so you know that you've left the enchanted kingdom of Lenox for the badly underdressed, overinformed, and clumsily razor-nicked present of 2005. Not-Charles is kind of a vague self-absorbed choad, which could have been sympathetic or interesting in the hands of a really good novelist, but isn't. The decision to make him a first-person narrator has something to do with it - a distinctive voice could have covered a multitude of sins, a colorless third-person narrator might have sustained a pleasant illusion of distance, but a colorless first-person narrator blandly enumerating his feelings for three hundred pages is just going to set the reader worrying about the finite nature of wood pulp and the human lifespan.

Anyway, Not-Charles goes to Oxford to study Orwell, his favorite author. He cheats on his girlfriend, feels bad about it, lies to her, cheats some more. ("Have I lost your sympathy?" the narrator asks earnestly after one encounter, never guessing how badly he's failed to earn any in the first place). He infodumps a little when he gets the chance, befriends some stereotypes, meets a roster of nice girls who are hard to tell apart, and has a series of experiences that are extremely meaningful and important to him as a person, less so to the reader. Every now and then there's a genuinely charming detail about a stupid college tradition, like "pennying" (bouncing a penny into someone else's wine glass means they have to chug ALL OF IT RIGHT NOW! a non-consensual and even more disgusting version of beer pong), but these are few and far between; you'd probably have a much better time keeping The Monster Book Of Stupid College Traditions Vol. II on a shelf above the toilet.

(Why didn't I like The Last Passenger? I don't know; either it or I was missing something.)

What I'm Reading Now

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Helen of Troy (one of many; this one is by Margaret George) It's mildly and persistently engaging without being really interesting. It's an easy read, but very long, and I'm feeling jealous of my time, even though all I'd end up doing with it is read another book. I'll probably give it another fifty pages and reasses.

I don't need to reasses Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson; it's a dry delight. Wilson does some mild interpretation and comparative literature on a few of the most interesting writers of the past 50 years (in 1931) with even-handed thoughtfulness and humor. That's all there is to it, but it's just the kind of thing I like.

Everyone in Axel's Castle reminds me a little of Bernardo Soares, the semi-fictional author and non-hero of The Book of Disquiet, which hadn't been discovered yet at the time Wilson was writing, but would have fit right in with Wilson's crew as a fairly large book (or series of notes) about how it's not only completely okay but much better, in fact more honest and even heroic, if Soares never finishes this book.

What I Plan to Read Next

I should probably cut this section because I never know. I have a letters collection of Rose Wilder Lane on my shelf, which I'll definitely get to at some point, but it's way down the queue. Next week I might try to catch up with some books I've read but haven't posted about yet.