Book twenty-two: Faust Parts 1 & 2 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
September 30, 2010
Preamble
Oh, the problems you come in for when you decide that you’re a book person! And more specifically when you decide that you’re a highfalutin books person. If you’re considering it, be warned: about fifteen minutes into any conversation with another book person (these conversations are sadly but mercifully rare) will come the question Have you read x (where x= a famous and obviously important book that of course you haven’t read)? Sometimes you get lucky and your interlocutor is an enthusiast of, say, contemporary fiction, and you can offer the excuse that you prefer something else, say, noncontemporary fiction. But most of the time you have to ruefully admit your failure – and then respond with the same question about a different book. In olden tymes I actually got in a “have you read” sparring match that barely managed to pretend it was a friendly conversation. I’m much better now, which is why I’ll just start with a little bit of
Confession Time
I have never read the following books:
Moby Dick, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, or anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, or Ayn Rand. I’ve never read Homer, Dante, or Virgil. Likewise Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire. I think the only French novel I’ve ever read was Hugo’s Notre Dame (so no Balzac, Zola, Proust – but I’ve just remembered I did read De Laclos’s Liasons Dangereuses). I have read virtually nothing by W.H. Auden, which is practically a thought crime. There are gaps in my reading that stand out to me as being in need of filling. Until recently one of those gaps was labeled “Goethe.” So, you know: check.
Book twenty-one: Descartes’ Bones by Russell Shorto
July 14, 2010
Preamble
Might as well bring it out here as anywhere. This year René Descartes seems to be the sun around which much of my reading orbits. It started with Unknown Quantity, where Descartes the mathematician made an appearance. As the famous French philosopher he was of course mentioned in La Belle France, even though he spent much of his career abroad and died in Sweden. In The Island at the Center of the World, also by Russell Shorto, Descartes the influential man of ideas didn’t actually make it on stage, but was rumored to be in a backstage dressing room with a couple of starlets and four grams of uncut Columbian. He makes an early appearance in From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, which I’ve been crawling through all year, and also features in Quicksilver, Longitude, and Born in Blood, all of which I’ve finished and will get to writing about eventually. So when my pal Aly, whose frequent book loans were part of why last year was so interesting, saw that I was reading Island and offered to lend me Descartes’ Bones, it seemed to be kind of inevitable.
René Descartes is someone everyone should know about, at least a little bit. And it’s funny, because my college degree is in philosophy, and I thought I did know about him. My reading this year, though, is making me reappraise the man. For one thing, I didn’t really work through Descartes beyond the usual Intro to Philosophy class, where Descartes was classed among the rationalists, whose epistemology broadly endorsed approaching truth through (but not exclusively through) reason, and contrasted with the empiricists, whose epistemology (again, broadly) restricts approaches to truth to sense data. What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, everything to do with western intellectual life since the seventeenth century. Let’s try that again: What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, The Essence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Closer. Last try: What we never really learned about was Descartes’ role in the development of, oh I don’t know, INVENTING THINKING. That gets us pretty close to the actual impact of this one man. I’m hard pressed to think of a significant historical or intellectual moment that can’t somehow be traced back to him. Thesis: René Descartes is the Kevin Bacon of the western mind. Antithesis: Actually, that’s probably true. QED.
Book twenty: A Small Town in Germany by John Le Carré
June 21, 2010
Preamble
I think I’m done with Le Carré for a while. No, let me rephrase that. I hope to God I’m done with Le Carré for a while. I’ve read all his best work, and my local booklender doesn’t have a copy of A Perfect Spy, which is the book I would most like to reread. And besides, he’s really good at what he does, but he really only does the one thing: a man unlucky in love, a curiosity to his peers, unravels a mystery within the confines of the utterly broken British intelligence service, and is sad about it. Can I be the only one who’s caught on? Probably not, but he has done it so well so many times that it’s hard to criticize it.
So I’m done with Le Carré, which means among other things I won’t be typing ALT-0233 as much. Just as well.
Preamble
I’ve mentioned before that the fall of of the Berlin wall and the wider Soviet empire is one of the milestones of my young life. It was probably the first historical event that I actually understood in an adult way, that I actually had the intellectual background to consider in context.
In 1983 (that was the year, son) I started reading the Tintin graphic novels (as we now know to call them) and happened one day across something similar-looking called When the Wind Blows at my local booklenders’. It turned out that instead of an adventure story about a puckish boy reporter, it was about a middle-aged British couple who survive a nuclear attack only to die of radiation poisoning in a whimsical, British way. “Wallace and Gromit starring in Grave of the Fireflies” gets you close. It didn’t make me scared about a possible nuclear war, but the mood of it has stayed with me.
When I was older and more aware of world events, I learned the names of Lech Walesa and Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and understood that they were heroic. I heard about Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika, and understood that they were cause for hope. And then Solidarity became part of the Polish government, and there were people standing atop the Berlin Wall, and Gorbachev was whisked off to the Crimean due to ill health. Suddenly (it seemed), communism in Europe had vanished.
Book eighteen: Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan
June 2, 2010
Preamble
Well, here we are, at the last Takeshi Kovacs novel Richard Morgan is ever likely to write. I’ve enjoyed reading these books, but it’s kind of a relief. Takeshi Kovacs is a very angry man, and Richard Morgan is, to a lesser extent, an angry author. Sometimes, especially at first, this anger is invigorating. Having been through three books and countless, escalating acts of violence, it has begun to make all three of us (that’s Kovacs, Morgan, and me) tired.
I think I have a lot to say about the book, so let’s get to it.
Preamble
Usually, I try to start these things out with something a little personal. Something that describes how I came to be interested in the book or the subject, or something that reflects my response to it. I figure if anyone’s bothering to read this crap, they can google anything else they really want to know about the background of the author or whatever. I mean, Wikipedia exists for a reason (and yes, it’s generally adequate). That’s why I chose the heading “preamble.” It comes before, and it just sort of, I don’t know, walks around? Sometimes, though, I don’t really have anywhere to go. Now is such a time.
I guess I could mention that I first read Graham Greene during a period when I was reading a lot of early 20-century English Christian intellectuals – mainly Evelyn Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, a touch of Dorothy Sayers and Malcolm Muggeridge, and of course the perennial J.R.R. Tolkien. (I almost said “sainted” instead of “perennial,” and then I thought, is there a movement to beatify Tolkien? Why or why not?) I had read and seen The Third Man and picked up The Power and the Glory. That, my friend, is one hell of a book. In fact, Wikipedia tells me that it’s one of President Obama’s favorite books, and whatever you may think of him, the man’s no dummy. One year before The Power and the Glory, which is usually considered Greene’s best work, he published The Confidential Agent.
Book sixteen: The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carré
May 25, 2010
Preamble
It’s an awful cliché, but let’s get it out there so we can look at it: At the end of a good novel we nearly always want to know what happened to the characters next. There’s a sense at the end of an enjoyable book that it somehow isn’t enough. Perhaps not at the end of À la recherce du temps perdu, but often the reader feels like the author should have or at least could have written more.
Out of this sense of incompleteness we get things like the pulp series of the 1930s and 40s – the serial adventures of Tarzan, or Mike Hammer, or Alan Quatermain. We get long series like the Harry Potter books. We get fanfiction, where amateur enthusiasts create new storylines for beloved characters (something many authors detest). And, alas, we get The Secret Pilgrim.
Book fifteen: Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan
May 24, 2010
Preamble
I have no idea why this year has become the year of genre fiction. This was not what I had set out to do. Until last year, my fantasy/sci-fi reading consisted entirely of a trip through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings every year or so, a little bit of Orson Scott Card (only the Ender books, including the newer “Shadow of x” books) and William Gibson. I would also read some Tom Clancy just to get some bad action writing in my diet. (It’s like salt: you don’t want to eat a whole mouthful of it, because it tastes like shit by itself, but it makes everything else taste so good.)
Then last year I found In the Name of the Wind, and that started everything. I think part of the attraction of this kind of writing as opposed to realistic fiction (and no, I don’t intend to get into a Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism-style digression here, but that’s where I’m starting, mentally. And you should read it, if you like that kind of thing.) is that by widening the scope and scale of possible actions, the potential for good plotting increases. (And if you don’t think realism constrains plotting, read Douglas Coupland some time. It’s like reading about your day at the office.) And this freedom in plotting also opens up potential for good writing that illuminates character. I don’t know exactly how to say this, but read George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and try to imagine a better story of political intriguing and you’ll understand what I mean. Of course, there’s plenty of bad plotting and writing, too, in genre fiction, but it stands out more somehow (to me, at least) and you’re always allowed to put a book down, even if I rarely do.
All that to say: here I am, writing up another science fiction novel, the second of the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan. That’s the other problem with sci-fi and fantasy: it’s always a god-damned trilogy, and so if it’s good, you know you’re going to have to read the whole thing. It’s the worst.
Preamble
In the interest of catching up with my seven-book backlog, I’m going to try to be briefer. I started out writing little 700-word précis, but the last few have been in the 1000- to 1400-word range, and that’s unsustainable when you don’t like writing and you’re as far behind as I am. But here’s a perfect book to be brief about: it’s a short history, after all.
Of famine. How on earth did I pick this one? At random. I simply walked into my local booklenders’ and addressed myself to the new nonfiction display. The cover of the book shows an engraving of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer and some attractive typography. See?
I do so like a good cover. (I have meant, by the way, to include more cover images. I may do some kind of Amazon thing to save me the effort of having to find and upload images, which is a small hassle, but large enough for me to want to avoid it.) Anyway, that’s it. I thumbed through it and it seemed interesting, so I took it home with me. By coincidence, the thing that’s stayed with me from Famine is another image.
Book thirteen: 1491 by Charles C. Mann
May 18, 2010
Preamble
One thing I don’t do much is talk with other people about books. Mostly this is because I don’t know many people with my outsized appetite for them. I guess it’s also because I prefer reading books to talking (or, God help me, writing) about them. But the core of it is a kind of embarrassment. Many of the people I know who are devoted readers often specialize in a genre or subject, and those of use who are generalists share a kind of embarrassment about our dilettantism. Or I do, and project my own feelings on everyone else. But talking to someone who is, say, a science enthusiast about a science book is embarrassing, because (a) I don’t really share their enthusiasm, and (b) the sum of my reading is a drop of understanding in a deep black well of ignorance.
Then, too, I’m a very passive reader. I don’t make marginal notes (This has always seemed an odd quirk to me. Martin Amis in his review of Nabokov’s Lolita mentions that he has several generations of notes in his copy and lists a few, none of which seem especially insightful to me and most of which are on the level of “good,” “very good,” or even the euphoric “v v good!!!” But such notes would be useful for going back through a book and finding the bits that seemed interesting or important. I just can’t bring myself to do it.) or even take issue with the arguments of a book while I’m reading it. I simply accept the information and let my mind sort out what I like or find useful at a deep background level. Part of the point of writing about what I’m reading is to try to do this more consciously, and I’m finding I’m v v bad!!! at it.
The result of this is that I don’t usually have much to say about the books I’m reading, or have read, other than whether I liked them. I feel like I do a poor job of responding to what I read, except in a kind of absorptive way. If I feel like I need to give some account of the book, I’m usually better at talking about the style than about the content. One of the things I’m trying (I guess) to do with this whole blogging project is to set down some kind of coherent response to the books I read, so that I can look at it later and be embarrassed. It’s an act of delaying the moment when I feel like I need to talk about the book and finding that everything that comes to mind is trivial.
Despite my reluctance, though, I sometimes find myself in the middle of an unexpected conversation about books. (I may ask myself, Well, how did I get here?) Such a thing happened the other day at work with my colleague Evan, whose interests are – and here I’m going to risk insulting him (rather than, as usual, deliberately and directly insult him) – both eclectic and oddly circumscribed. He lent me 1491 as an act of mercy after I had, in a moment of mental weakness, confused the Inca and Mayan peoples. Well, I didn’t actually mistake one of them for the other. I just forgot that the Inca weren’t in Mexico. And before you start feeling all smug, remember: you probably do that kind of thing all the time without knowing it.
