READIN

Monday, October 9th, 2006

🦋 10 books I look forward to reading

David of Blagdaross (who tells me his blog is a bit inspired by READIN) has tagged me with a meme -- how exciting! He asks me to poke through my bookshelves and find 10 books that "I'm really glad I own and will definitely get around to reading". So (in no particular order):

• The Bible. (King James translation). Over the years I have read some portions of it; as my life goes on I look forward to reading more.
• The Koran. (A.J. Arberry translation). I'm fascinated by some things like Rumi's poetry that I think I could understand better if I had more of a passing familiarity with the Koran.
• Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. I have technically read this book, in the sense of sitting at my desk and moving my eyes over the words on all of its pages. But am at least 2 or 3 readings away from any kind of real comprehension.
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith. If you have been reading my entries much lately you know how much I have admired her other two books. This one is on my list for soon.
• Dombey and Son and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. When I was reading Bleak House this summer, loving it, I picked up these two books at a yard sale meaning to read them soon. Got distracted by other stuff; but they are still on the queue.
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I'm always starting this book and getting about halfway through before I get distracted. Possibly it does not belong on this list as there is no real guarantee I will one day start it and be interested enough to read it through.
• Inferno. (Robert Pinsky translation). When I turned 35 I started rereading this (having previously read it in a different translation, at the tender age of 18), thinking that age would give me some special insight. As it turned out I grew quickly distracted. But sometime soon I will sit down with it again.
• Lost Highway by Peter Guralnick. Music journalism is kind of a bane for me -- it always seems like it should be really interesting but when push comes to shove, I can't stay with it for more than a few pages. But everybody tells me this book is great.

Some notes: I did not include any foreign-language books -- there are many in my library (mostly in German and Latin) that I hope one day to read; but being able to read the language is an important first step. Also I did not, by and large, include any of the books I am meaning to reread -- I would not know where to start such a list. Looking through my shelves this evening I am reminded of how many books I have read and have only fleeting memories of -- a phenomenon which I founded this web site, in part, to combat. Thanks David, for the opportunity to go through the collection.

posted evening of October 9th, 2006: Respond

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

I finished The Autograph Man today and found the ending very powerful. And let me just say that based on the two books I've read so far, Ms. Smith is the queen of the loose thread. There are so many bits of unresolved sub-plot as you get to the end, you cannot help but think there's no way these are all going to be wrapped up in any way approaching verisimilitude -- and feel a wave of relief at the end, when many are just left hanging. It does not feel willy-nilly either -- the threads that are left open are the ones best suited to keep the story in your consciousness a while longer, thinking about how it could move forward past the closing scenes.

posted evening of September 26th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, September 22nd, 2006

I really like the pacing of The Autograph Man -- the movement can be furiously fast but at the same time you feel a kind of deliberation on the author's part, a conscious movement through the story -- the connections undergirding the text feel like the beams of a building's skeleton.

posted afternoon of September 22nd, 2006: Respond
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Thursday, September 21st, 2006

I am warming up to The Autograph Man. Thinking about what I meant by saying it was not serious, probably it was that I suspected there were not going to be any layers of meaning under the playful narration -- that's probably why I compared it to The Fan Man, which I remember enjoying a lot but not seeing any meaning in its play.

But now I am seeing those layers of meaning that I thought would not be there. So. Don't judge a book by its first few chapters -- I have read through Part I now and am just starting Part II -- and it seems to me the core of Part I was a non-verbal debate among Alex-Li, Adam, Mark, and Joseph over what the experience of being Jewish is. What hipped me to this was reading a post of Teofilo's that I happened on today, which describes a take on the Jewish experience that I think is very close to Mark's. Compare Teo's post to this passage:

...no matter what Mountjoy thought, he had not become a rabbi to please his father. In his own small way he had wanted to carry things forward. Like the continuity man on a film set. At the time, this was an analogy that had not satisfied Adam, who thought the call to the rabbinate should be entirely pure, a discussion a man has with God. But God had never spoken to Rubinfine, really. Rubinfine was simply, and honestly, a fan of the people he had come from.... This was the only way he had ever found to show it, that affection.

I am seeing now what this book has in common with White Teeth, which is that both books are about communities, the characters are seen primarily as members of their community. I liked that about White Teeth and it is coming in well here too.

posted evening of September 21st, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Yesterday I finished reading White Teeth and started reading The Autograph Man. White Teeth starts out great and just keeps getting better and better as it progresses. The ending blew me away. The vast quantity of threads left loose and hanging did not bother me at all, indeed it added something. My initial reaction to The Autograph Man was, it seems really fun and well-written, sort of like a more coherent equivalent of The Fan Man, but not a Serious Novel in the same way White Teeth was. Of course this reaction prompts me to do some thinking about what would make it serious or not -- I haven't come up with much yet in that regard. For now I am treating it as an analogue of The Crying of Lot 49 and hoping it grows on me the same way that novel has.

posted morning of September 20th, 2006: Respond
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Thursday, September 14th, 2006

A couple of things about White Teeth -- God it is making me feel old! I am identifying closely, in parts, with Archie and with Samad, in all their flawed, petty weakness. From a little reading of her Wikipædia bio, Irie would seem to be the character that represents the author. I am reading the chapter that centers around her education right now, and finding it very powerful -- the description of her class reading Sonnet 127 seemed like kind of a set piece, but it moved me.

posted evening of September 14th, 2006: Respond

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

I started reading Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth, on the train this morning, and got so wrapped up that I continued reading for another half hour after I got off the train, and came in to work a little late. I'm reading this on the recommendation of Jennifer Egan. And feeling a bit excited about how much contemporary fiction I have been reading lately -- Smith is five years my junior, where most of the authors I have read in my time are much older than I -- maybe this heralds a new day of my being more up-to-date in my literary tastes.

posted morning of September 12th, 2006: Respond

Monday, September 4th, 2006

The ending of The Russian Debutante's Handbook does not disappoint -- the last hundred pages are masterful -- I could not tear myself away. And look at this epigram from the final pages of the novel:

Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.

Beautiful stuff.

posted evening of September 4th, 2006: Respond
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Sunday, September third, 2006

🦋 Curious

So in Chapter 25 of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Vladimir is looking at Morgan's wall. He sees a poster of The Boot, which is the only remaining bit of a gargantuan statue of Stalin which was destroyed after the republic of Stolovaya broke away from the USSR. "Beneath it, a Stolovan slogan: 'Graždanku! Otporim vsyechi Stalinski çudoviši!' Vladimir could never be sure of the funny Stolovan language, but translated into normal Russian this could be an exhortation along the lines of 'Citizens! Let us take the ax to all of Stalin's monstrosities!'" -- the meaning of this is not exactly clear to me. Stolovan is a Slavic language which Shteyngart has invented. Is the quoted phrase correct Russian which translates as given, and Volodya is speculating that the words may have different idiomatic meanings in Stolovan? Or is the grammar not-quite-Russian and the speculation is V. trying to figure out how to run the words together? It's a little hard for me to figure out how V. would be able to come up with that translation but not to be sure it was an accurate one.

Update: My esteemed colleague LanguageHat (of LanguageHat.com) comes bearing enlightenment:

It's certainly not Russian [he says], and I doubt it's some obscure Slavic language; it's presumably Shteyngart's invention. (For one thing, "grazhdanku" would be the accusative singular of the feminine form of 'citizen' in Russian, and it wouldn't be a plural nominative in any Slavic I've ever heard of.) "Stalinskie chudovishchi" would be 'Stalin's monsters' in Russian, so that's where that comes from; in Russian, otpor is 'repulse, rebuff,' and otporot' is either 'to rip off' or 'to flog, thrash' (though it also means 'to fuck' in slang), but there is no verb otporit'.

Also he confirms that I was right in my hunches about pronunciation.

posted evening of September third, 2006: Respond
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Friday, September first, 2006

I'm feeling a lot of kinship with Vladimir Girshkin in The Russian Debutante's Handbook. The story is reading kind of like a fantasy of mine from my younger days, combined with reflections I've been thinking about lately to do with creative effort and getting by -- sorry about the extreme incoherence, it's all sort of impressionistic at this point.

I'm wondering about the correct pronunciation of Volodya -- I think it must be "Vo-LOD-ya" but frequently when my eye lights on it, I hear "Vo-lo-DYE-a". A similar question applies to Stolovaya -- whether the accent is on LO or on VAY.

Shteyngart has the best-ever jacket photo on this book.

posted evening of September first, 2006: Respond

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