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What I've Finished Reading

A couple of 99 Novels that didn't leave a tremendous impression - Staying On is a very mildly comic blunderabout featuring saddish ex-Raj retirees who are about to get kicked out of their hotel, and their friends and acquintances. It was a little livelier than Life in the West, which I read all of very quickly in about the same frame of mind as I've heard stressed-out tech journalists describe the experience of reading Twitter: a half-bored, half-fixated twilight hunger. Not that I thought it was a bad book; I just got into that bag-of-chips airport mindset very early on and never managed to read it any other way. An ex-spy documentarian has trouble with his wife and feelings about human history. There's a lot of hanging around in hotels and lively perfunctory sex and smoking. It was all right, but I can't think of a single person I'd recommend it to - probably because I read it too fast, to be honest.

I am doing these books, which I mostly enjoyed, a disservice by dashing a handful of careless words over them, and probably doing another kind of disservice by squandering buckets of text on how much I don't get Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe I'm feeling more impatient than usual because. . .


It's The Final Countdown

There are now only NINE books remaining of the original 99 Novels. Should I slow down and take them one by one? Probably!

The Final Nine:
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
The Doctor's Wife -- Brian Moore
Dubin's Lives -- Bernard Malamud
Riddley Walker -- Russell Hoban
Darconville's Cat -- Alexander Theroux
The Mosquito Coast -- Paul Theroux
Creation -- Gore Vidal
The Rebel Angels -- Robertson Davies
Ancient Evenings -- Norman Mailer

I'm going to miss this beautiful list (even if I don't miss Gravity's Rainbow).


What I'm Reading Now

Gravity's Rainbow, natch! (as Pynchon and the Rainbros would say - "natch," like "sez," is one of the Pynchster's creaky gonzo voice tics). I've just read back up to about the point I left off - the famous Gross British Candies Set Piece, in which Tyrone Slothrop, the American with the mysteriously prophetic erections, is force-fed a bunch of disgusting British candies by his girlfriend of the moment and her landlady. This sequence is a massive clattering verbal contraption that looks a little like it ought to be hilarious but isn't quite. Actually, some of the candies presented for my horrified amusement sound nice. I'd eat a wine jelly right now if I had one.

Anyway, as Marie Kondo says (or "sez"), all books come into our lives to teach us something. The lesson being slowly doled out by Gravity's Rainbow may be that you can't love every book, or even feel mildly entertained by every book, no matter how much you want to. Some books come into our lives to teach us that some doors stay closed.

What I Plan to Read Next

Three new 99 Novels from the library, making up 1/3 of the total remaining! Riddley Walker, The Doctor's Wife, and Dubin's Lives. They are all of them not Gravity's Rainbow and I'm looking forward to reading them. I also picked up a poetry book called You Are Not Stendhal, which has nothing to do with anything, but I saw the title and immediately thought "YOU DON'T KNOW ME" and therefore had to take it home. I have to admit that the author does have me pegged in one very specific respect.

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