Book twelve: The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis
April 12, 2010
Preamble
A few years back (this would be 2000-ish) I decided I should read more contemporary (nongenre) fiction, which until then I had never been interested in. Turning to my local booksellers’ and browsing at random, I managed to come up with three consecutive winners: Michael Chabon (Kavalier and Clay will always be a favorite; Werewolves in Their Youth stuns like a blow to the head.), Jim Crace (Quarantine was good, but The Devil’s Larder made me cry about food, and that’s something), and Martin Amis.
I picked up Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow, the story of which is told in reverse, beginning with the death of an elderly man and ending with his return to the womb. Seeming too proud of his cleverness would ruin the effect, but Amis manages the tale-in-reverse casually, rather than hanging it on the refrigerator like a proud parent. And when the dying man regains his vigor, becomes an illegal abortionist, and starts banging all the nurses at his hospital, well, I sat up and paid attention. Look, there isn’t a fine line between being clever and being self-consciously clever; there’s a big black crevasse, and Amis stays on the right side of it, writing with confidence and artistry. Oddly, I didn’t pick up anything else by Amis until I saw The War Against Cliché. I haven’t read anything of his since, though I’ve always meant to.
Interestingly but irrelevantly, Amis is a controversial figure these days, partly because he hasn’t written anything that has been as generally praised as his first few novels, and partly because he’s expressed some strong views about Islamic radicalism (you can get the digest at his Wikipedia entry). They seem within the bounds of rational discourse to me, but you never know with these English. Most of the people likely to agree with him don’t have a lot of pull in literary circles. He may have to do a little crow-eating and public self-criticism to get back in the good graces of the intelligentsia.
Nevertheless, to me he has been untouchable ever since he delivered his version of Martin Luther’s legendary “here I stand.” Having been taken to task for saying some less than nice things about Katie Price (and if you don’t know who Katie Price is, don’t click this link) and about the state of English culture when her biography became a bestseller, he declared:
Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can’t be snobbish about Katie Price you are dead, you’ve gone.
Book eleven: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
March 23, 2010
Preamble
I mentioned previously that I claim kingship over all nerddom. Partly this is because of my majestic beard, which is truly worthy of a king. Full yet tidy, dark with the vigor of manhood yet streaked with the silver of wisdom, it sits astride my face like a beatific surgical mask. It grants me a +2 Charisma bonus to Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate checks. Because, yes, I have been a role playing gamer since rolling twenties meant you were throwing four dice.
Every Monday evening five friends and I gather online to play old-school pencil and paper RPGs online using Skype for group conversation and MapTool for tactical movement and dice rolling. We began playing Dungeons and Dragons, but have since branched out to try a wide range of rule systems and settings. Most recently we have been playing a with a set of rules called Eclipse Phase, which puts players in a future where technological modifications to the human body have radically altered what it means to be human, and personalities can be transferred from body (or “sleeve”) to body. Like most RPGs, Eclipse Phase draws heavily from fiction, science fiction in this case, and the rulebook in fact has a long bibliography at the end – too long, for someone looking to read a book or two and wanting to waste no time on inferior examples of the type. Thankfully, my friend Dave had read some of the books on the list, and recommended Altered Carbon. Good call.
Book ten: Biomega Vol. 1 by Tsutomu Nihei
March 19, 2010
Preamble
I’m a nerd. In fact, I make the only slightly outrageous claim to be the king of all nerds. I base this claim not on any profound depth of nerdery in any one area, but because the list of my nerdly interests covers almost everything uncool (or subversively cool). Among them is an interest in anime, the Japanese cartoon series that range from the desperately perverted to the merely stupid, to the incredibly badass. (NB: I only watch the incredibly badass kind.) Another recent interest is manga, the Japanese comic books you read backwards because the Japanese want it that way.
Manga, which provide the original source material for many anime, run the same continuum from nasty to dull to bitchin’ that you find in anime. And again, I’m only interested in the bitchin’ type, though the boundaries blur, and you can find some aspect of each type in most anime or manga. (Good god, I just want to take myself out behind the portable classrooms, punch myself in the stomach, and take my lunch money. But I will persist.)
One other thing before I get to Biomega. I wasn’t sure whether to write about this one, partly because of the embarrassment, but also because of the basic question: is it a book? The conclusion I’ve reached is a conditional yes. Obviously the graphic novel, of which manga form an important and growing subcategory, has been gaining cultural acceptance, mostly because of film adaptations of works by Frank Miller (Sin City, 300) and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). And while I’m not willing to extend the same welcome to comic books, long-form comic art can, I think, be considered books, with an odd caveat.
Actually, now that I think about it, this caveat applies to more than just comic books. Okay, this is totally provisional and written on the fly, but: take any genre not a traditional subject of humanistic study, e.g., genre fiction, leadership books, teen fiction, comic books, inspirational or devotional books. Reading such works exclusively, that is, outside of the context of a more general reading in the humanities, is not really reading. It’s staring into the mirror of your lack of interest in the world around you. There. Sweeping generality, self-aggrandizement, broadly insulting. That’s a trifecta. Onward!
Preamble
My old friend Shayne and his incredible wife, Stephanie, just had a son. Well done, I say. Their first child is intelligent, sweet, and beautiful, and I’m sure the newcomer will continue the streak. I mention this mostly because I don’t have much to say in the preamble for this book, and partly because this book was recommended to me by Stephanie. Well, actually, I saw the book lying around while helping them move and asked her if it was any good, and she said it was. It’s not like she called and said, “Oh my god, Doug, you just have to read this book. It’s the absolute shizzle!”
Interlude: Grammar Quiz
What grammatical construction is perfectly illustrated in the first sentence of the previous paragraph?
Preamble (continued)
My first job out of college was editing at a nonprofit educational foundation focused on colonial and early American history. I like to think I’m pretty up to date on the American founding. However, most histories of early America begin with Jamestown and jump to the Plymouth landing. New Amsterdam and the history of Dutch colonies in North America get short shrift (even in this song - seriously, watch the video [which itself gets the shortest of all possible shrifts in this version]) in the American story. Russell Shorto aims to amend this in The Island at the Center of the World.
In praise of the trade paperback
March 15, 2010
Would someone please explain
In my garage, I have a lot of books. Some day they will be invited inside, but for now, they remain not quite outdoors, not really indoors. There are lots of them. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, and that was after I weeded out the grad school books that I don’t think I’ll ever bother reading again (with all due respect to my onetime professor, my interest in renewing my acquaintance with Renaissance Feminism : Literary Texts and Political Models has been on a long, continuous decline since – and here I’m estimating – forever.). This number has been accumulating gradually since I was, what? 13 or 14, I suppose, when I started buying books for myself.
What’s interesting is that you can trace my reading habits visually through the books themselves. (Retraction: it’s not interesting.) Not wanting to spend my hard-earned money foolishly, at first I bought only the cheapest mass market paperback editions I could find. Thus my old copies of William Gibson and Douglas Adams are in the classic science fiction pocket book size; and a great stack of cheap, sturdy Signet Classics editions of Dickens, Austen, Hardy waits for me to decide whether the mice have finally eaten too much of them.
As my jobs began to pay better in late high school, I began to look more to used booksellers to get older editions of books to add that extra bit of pretentiousness – thus my treasured copy of The Idiot and a collected works of Lewis Carroll, among others, wait for their dusty bit of posh to be aired out again. With the arrival of college, first the big Norton anthologies of American, English, and world literature appear, along with the big Riverside Chaucer (though not the Shakespeare: I had my own copy already, bought for $10 at Powell’s Books). Then, as I moved from the survey courses to the more specific ones – Faulkner and Hemingway, Contemporary Novel, a core begins to form, and it’s composed of trade paperbacks. The pattern has held consistent since then. Oh, sure, I have my sweet collection of vintage pulp detective fiction in the pocket size, and now and then I can’t wait for the trade and buy a hardcover. But 95 percent of the books I’ve bought since college are trade paperbacks.
Book eight: La Belle France by Alistair Horne
March 12, 2010
Preamble
Here’s something new. For the first time this year I’m writing about a book that I’ve read before. I first picked up La Belle France (published in the UK under the ungainly and inaccurate title France: Friend or Foe? Perhaps there was a wave of Francophobia going around at the time.) a few years ago (No earlier than 2006, when it came out in trade paperback. One of these days I’m going to have to write something about my love for the trade paperback.), shortly after I had read Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (trade paperback, 2003), which had given me a hankering for more general history.
It makes me sad to say it, but once Horne’s generation is gone, we probably won’t read history like this again. Born in 1923, Horne served in the RAF during World War 2, and came home to become, eventually, Britain’s leading historian of France. His authorial tone is donnish and confident, and his citations at this point in his career are mainly to either primary sources or his own previous works. And why not? When, for writing French history, you’ve been awarded the legion d’honneur by France, you’re probably doing it right. But the gentility and assurance of his old-school tone are giving way to a more reportorial I’ve-done-my-research-let-me-walk-you-through-it style of writing – a good thing in my opinion. It’s just that no one will ever write in the old way again, and I get just a little Winnie-the-Pooh about it sometimes. It’s allowed.
Book seven: Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire
March 9, 2010
Preamble
I’m a humanities guy. My college major was English and Philosophy (and, briefly, music). That I have a job is a small miracle. That my job has nothing to do with my studies is almost tautological. In fact, I took a total of two science classes in college, one of which I passed thanks in part to a grading error. The other was college algebra, in which I did surprisingly well. Then again, I did well in math in high school, too (and was taught from a real curriculum, unlike my high school history, as I’ve mentioned).
Since then, my reading in the sciences has been slim. I read xkcd. Does that count? I read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos a few years ago, and enjoyed it. I’m always on the lookout for a good general-reader book on scientific subjects, but I don’t seem to get into that section at my local booksellers’ that often. Lately I’ve felt that I wasn’t keeping up with the maths end of my brain, and started looking for a book that might give me a little refresher on the how of math along with a better idea of the why. The why of math is of course is the question behind every math student’s complaint: “I’ll never use this in real life.” Having recently been assured by a scientist I’m acquainted with that algebra has actually application to his daily work, I began browsing for an algebra book to read. From this search came my earlier complaint that algebra books tend to be visually nasty.
In the process, I happened across Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity and decided to have a go at it. It promised a mix of algebra and history, which I thought might lessen the shock of my first encounter with math since 1994.
Book six: Babylon by Joan Oates
February 12, 2010
Preamble
Confession time. Not everything here is a fresh as new-mown grass (or, as new as freshly mown grass. You decide!). There is sometimes a lapse between when I begin writing a post and when I publish it. This is because of a number of factors which can all be reduced to two things: 1) I hate writing and 2) I’m lazy. Okay, that’s really only one thing. Fine. So, for instance, when in the previous post I said I Babylon was up next, I had already finished that book, plus two more. In fact, I’m writing this moments after posting about Patrick Rothfuss’s brilliant The Name of the Wind.
Likewise, when previously I complained about the difficulty of finding a good book on the Babylonian empire, I was halfway through what I had already determined was not one. It’s these little fictions that make me feel just a little guilty about blogging at all. But, as they say in France, le fuck it.
You could, if you were the dullest person ever in the world, or my future biographer (Hello there! My head was never as large it’s usually reported), trace my interest in ancient history to the fundamentalist Christian history curriculum I was taught from in seventh grade. With its keen interest in supporting the historical basis of the Bible, it spent a great deal of time on the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. And, seriously, this was awesome. Sure, if you came to me today and said, “I would like to teach your obviously very intelligent child about the history of the world based on a curriculum prepared by an unaccredited, KJV-only, strict creationist, premillenialist college,” I would, as they say in France, invitez-vous á fuck yourself. But all through middle and high school I was taught from this curriculum, and I learned plenty.
Book five: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
February 9, 2010
Preamble
Okay, I’ve mentioned Patrick Rothfuss in every other post (meaning not ” in every post but this one” but “in alternating posts”) so far. It’s too much. I’m not trying to put together a fantasy blog, or a fiction blog, or a Rothfuss fansite. It’s an accident of timing – genre fiction is such a relaxing way to end the year that with everything else going on, it was easier to read spy and fantasy novels than to start into something serious and heavy.
The list of what I’m currently reading from the previous post shows that I have four history titles running alongside one fantasy novel. This should allay any fears that I’m going to read trivial books all year (and, for all their virtues, I wouldn’t call any of the books I’ve read so far serious). The list certainly makes me feel better about my reading. After all, a steady diet of nothing but fantasy novels would make me one of those people, heaven forfend.
But to be honest I started all four nonfiction titles before I picked up The Name of the Wind for the third time. And I’m still reading them now. Some possible reasons for this follow.
