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

This poem by Wallace Stevens.

I enjoyed Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet in spite of some writing choices I wasn't fond of (mostly the early end-of-chapter leaps into hectoring lyricism). The subject matter - early computers and the early Internet - is always fascinating.

Y is for Yesterday brought an anticlimactic end to the Alphabet of Destruction. Kinsey turns thirty-nine, gets stalked by a sneaky serial killer, investigates a complicated blackmail scheme, and introduces new friends to the transcendent peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich experience. Not a bad book, not the best one. The dedication reveals that one of Sue Grafton's grandkids is named Kinsey, which I thought was a little bit adorable.

I also read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, a fast-paced middle-grade fantasy about a kid who finds out he's the son of Poseidon. I didn't mean to, but I picked it up one day and it was easy enough not to put it down. The plot is just one damn thing after another, and some of its asides were a little too goofy for me (the Olympians moved to New York to follow "the flame of Western civilization?" Demigods are dyslexic because their brains are "wired for ancient Greek"?") but Percy is a likable narrator and Riordan is having an extremely good time cramming every allusion he can think of into this narrow frame. The very best (because worst) was "Crusty's Waterbed Emporium," home of beds you really don't want to try for yourself.

What I'm Reading Now

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, a prison memoir by Breyten Breytenbach, and The Zookeepers' War, a light-hearted account of rival zoos in East and West Berlin; The Sea of Monsters, a sequel to The Lightning Thief with equally video-game-like pacing (I mean 1980s-style arcade games, not your fancy newfangled kind with plots and whatnot). And Don Quixote. I feel strongly that Don Quixote, like nearly everything else, is funnier when the supporting characters aren't working themselves up into gales of laughter at the follies of the mains, but you can't have everything in this fallen world.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm not sure, but hopefully I'll be a little better-adjusted next week to some schedule changes, and will have more to report in a slightly less offhand way. Promises, promises.

What I've Finished Reading

Nothing! I recently decided to approach my to-read shelf in physical order of which book was closest, with the result that all my books are giant and slow right now! Don Quixote is probably the second-beachiest of my current reads, which I guess isn't that surprising given that it was the triumphant bestseller of 1605.

Wait, no, not nothing. But What if We're Wrong: Thinking About The Present As if It Were the Past was a breezy treat by Chuck Klosterman. The entire book is in the title; we just sit down and have a chat with Klosterman about what he thinks the TV of today might look like in a couple hundred years and what people might remember about The Rock Era of music and so on. At the end of every paragraph, practically, he throws up his hands and goes, "But that's just a guess! I could be totally wrong about all of this!" It's a fun conversation that doesn't feel one-sided, even though it's technically a book and not a conversation. Unfortunately, it was too breezy to last and now it's over almost before it began.

AND I completely forgot to say anything about Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, which was both slightly disappointing and mildly impressive because it turned out to be exactly the book described to me four years ago: a weird, stumpy, ambiguously pointless, ugly but compelling comedy of an alt history. The guy who recommended it to me told me I should read it in blank library binding if possible, so the back cover/cover illustration wouldn't immediately spoil the entire premise for me, then went on to spoil me anyway. Having now read it, I think he was right about the library binding. That plus my intrinsic laziness means I'll say no more.

What I'm Reading Now

Large books! Horizon by Barry Lopez is making me extrememly aware of how much time I spend indoors. Education of an Idealist is a memoir by Samantha Power, a journalist and diplomat. It was a Christmas present from my parents, so I feel obligated to read it all, and while the subject matter is interesting (especially the odd personal anecdote, like when she remembers hanging around her father's neighborhood pub as a child), it's just not doing much for me as a book. But it's early yet, so maybe things will pick up? I finally decided to make some progress on History of the Peloponnesian War, so there's Pericles being tediously patriotic and now a super depressing plague. Then there's W is for Wasted, which is taking a while because I've been saving it for bedtime, having nothing else suitable for drowsy reading. Kinsey meets two dead bodies in the first chapter. They appear to be unrelated, but we know better because we've read 22 of these already. But HOW are they related? That's another question I won't be answering.

Also, Don Quixote!

( I Put On My Cardboard Helmet and Sally Forth )

What I Plan to Read Next

Whatever Sue Grafton's X is for, obviously! Plus a bunch of work stuff for the next few days.