Below is my list of books for the year. I just copied my XL file so things are kinda scrunched together. As of today, I've finished the first five books, roughly eight percent of the 17,384 pages. Considering the year is almost 33 percent in the books (ha ha), that's not good. But I am enjoying the challenge. I just finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides which I thought was great. Like Shepard, he's really good with characters in the midst of adolescence as anyone who's read The Virgin Suicides can attest. I know he just had a short story in The New Yorker with art by John Baldessari. I've got to check that out. I've been going around saying "Total ripoff" in my best Greek/ethnic voice.
So, I have to chose a new book. I'd like to read The Masters Butchers Singing Club or White Teeth but they both seem like family dramas and I just got through one of those. Middlesex, I mean. So, I'm thinking maybe Cloudsplitter or Cryptonomicon or Sacred Hunger which I looked at tonight. The problem is I have a limited number of fiction books so I need to read a non-fiction one at the same time. I thought maybe With the Old Breed. I might throw in a short book here and there just to check them off the list. The Civil War stuff I'm putting off until the summer. Then, it's war. And more war.
Like You'd Understand, Anyway - Shepard, Jim 211
And a Bottle of Rum - Curtis, Wayne 256
Out Stealing Horses - Petterson, Per 258
Mishima's Sword - Ross, Christopher 244
Middlesex - Eugenides, Jeffrey 529
With the Old Breed - Sledge, E.B. 315
Meat is Murder -Pernice, Joe 102
The Rest is Noise -Ross, Alex 543
Cloudsplitter - Banks, Russell 758
The Masters Butchers Singing Club - Erdich, Louise 388
Bleachers - Grisham, John 163
The Unconsoled - Ishiguro, Kazou 535
The Road - McCarthy, Cormac 241
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness - Oe, Kenzaburo 261
White Teeth - Smith, Zadie 448
Cryptonomicon - Stephenson, Neal 910
Bay of Souls - Stone, Robert 249
Perfume - Suskind, Patrick 310
Sacred Hunger - Unsworth, Barry 630
Magical Thinking - Burroughs, Augusten 268
A Life in Writing - Chaplin, Charles 203
Reading, Writing and Leaving Home - Freed, Lynn 234
Interesting Times - Hobsbawn, Eric 418
Teacher Man - McCourt, Frank 258
Living to Tell the Tale - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 484
Herman Melville - Parker, Hershel 883
A Gentle Madness - Basbanes, Nicholas A. 533
Dark Star Safari - Theroux, Paul 472
The God Delusion - Dawkins, Richard 374
The Beleaguered City - Foote, Shelby 347
Battle Cry of Freedom - McPherson, James 867
Stillness at Appomattox - Caton, Bruce 380
Personal Memoirs - Grant, Ullysses S. 682
TCW -Fort Sumter to Perryville - Foote, Shelby 810
TCW- Fredericksburg to Meridian - Foote, Shelby 976
TCW - Red River to Appomattox - Foote, Shelby 1060
Literary Feuds - Arthur, Anthony 208
Nature Noir - Smith, Jordan Fisher 213
The March - Doctorow, E.L. 363
17384 Total Pages
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
like you'd understand, anyway
Jim Shepard doesn’t need my help. There’s no place for an amanuensis here. I just want to say that I loved his book of short stories. It was the first book I read this year, the start of my long slog, begun out in the desert near Joshua Tree and finished in a comfortable chair next to our bookshelf. I still haven’t put it up, still haven’t found a place for it. Instead, it’s floated around from bedroom to office to bookbag, always within reach when I want to tell somebody about a great new book.
I’ve given it to two people: My good friend Steve Carr and my crazy guitar teacher, Pete Steinberg who refers to me as “Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer” (my real name is John). Whenever Pete calls me on he phone and I say hello, he says, “Is this Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer?” It goes on from there. Pete is a hell of a guitar player, especially finger picking blues, a great teacher, and good conversation. I record all my lessons and one day I’m going to go back, transcribe his insanity and write the Pete Steinberg story. Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll be kind. One thing Pete likes to talk about the failed adventures of history’s wayfarers. Not surprisingly, his favorite story was My First South Central Australian Expedition.
I like that one too. Who doesn’t love a good shipwreck, even in the Australian desert? But I’d say my favorite stories were the two Eastern Bloc themed ones, The Zero Meter Diving Team and Eros 7 and the high school football story Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak. But really the entire book was fun to read. I haven’t read anything else by Shepard but I’ll get there. Probably not this year, but eventually.
I really like Shepard’s humor and use of real facts. The range here of styles here is mind-boggling but you also imagine it must have been a joy to write (if writing can ever be described as being a joy). But seriously, one day (week? month?) you’re writing about three brothers dealing with the Chernobyl, the next you’re writing as Aeschylus. What also is cool is Shepard cites his sources in the Acknowledgement at the front of the book. So you see how a story like Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay, which includes an account of a tsunami and an earthquake, was shaped by real events which Shepard read up on.
Of course, this attention to detail or facts wouldn’t work if the characters weren’t compelling. “like you’d understand, anyway” is character driven. All of the stories are first person narratives. You might think this would compromise the language, but it doesn’t and this might be the true wonder of Shepard’s work. He can get away with beautiful descriptions without the language being too lyrical and distracting you from the work. For instance, in The Zero Meter Diving Team, the narrator Boris describes his severely contaminated brother who was inside Chernobyl when it blew saying, “he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from rich tropical wood.” It’s a great line but it doesn’t slow the pace or bring the reader self-consciously out of the pleasure of reading.
In the two Russian stories, Shepard also captures spot on the sort of fatalistic sense of humor particular to Eastern Europeans (Actually, South Americans have this sense of humor too. Just about everybody besides Americans). When Boris visits his youngest brother, Petya in the hospital, the latter is clearly glad to see him but gives him a hard time:
“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course I am,” I told him.
“With you sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he said.
The fate of the two sick brothers is another nice touch. Petya, who Boris thinks is lazy, is confined to his apartment on a pension with his cigarettes and his tape player and no one to nag him. Mikhail, who always had problems sleeping, is finally able to rest.
But my favorite character is Solovyova, the backup female cosmonaut in the story Eros 7 whose stolid exterior hides a fascinating personality. Her answers are always calculated and spoken when the women’s superiors are within earshot. And yet she’s always needling the narrator, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who has been chosen to be the first female in space. Valentina falls in love with Bykovsky, a male cosmonaut in the same program and Solovyova is not only aware of it, she’s jealous and perhaps in love with the narrator. At one point she chastises the narrator’s obvious feeling for Bykovsky. “Look at your absorption! It’s like a warped version of intellectual activity.” There’s a real sense of sadness in Solovyova, sadness for herself and her secondary position but also a sadness that her friendship with Valentina is ending. It’s in her silences and her farewell where instead of kissing three times, the two bang their helmets together.
Overall, it’s a really wonderful book, which I hope to reread soon.
I’ve given it to two people: My good friend Steve Carr and my crazy guitar teacher, Pete Steinberg who refers to me as “Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer” (my real name is John). Whenever Pete calls me on he phone and I say hello, he says, “Is this Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer?” It goes on from there. Pete is a hell of a guitar player, especially finger picking blues, a great teacher, and good conversation. I record all my lessons and one day I’m going to go back, transcribe his insanity and write the Pete Steinberg story. Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll be kind. One thing Pete likes to talk about the failed adventures of history’s wayfarers. Not surprisingly, his favorite story was My First South Central Australian Expedition.
I like that one too. Who doesn’t love a good shipwreck, even in the Australian desert? But I’d say my favorite stories were the two Eastern Bloc themed ones, The Zero Meter Diving Team and Eros 7 and the high school football story Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak. But really the entire book was fun to read. I haven’t read anything else by Shepard but I’ll get there. Probably not this year, but eventually.
I really like Shepard’s humor and use of real facts. The range here of styles here is mind-boggling but you also imagine it must have been a joy to write (if writing can ever be described as being a joy). But seriously, one day (week? month?) you’re writing about three brothers dealing with the Chernobyl, the next you’re writing as Aeschylus. What also is cool is Shepard cites his sources in the Acknowledgement at the front of the book. So you see how a story like Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay, which includes an account of a tsunami and an earthquake, was shaped by real events which Shepard read up on.
Of course, this attention to detail or facts wouldn’t work if the characters weren’t compelling. “like you’d understand, anyway” is character driven. All of the stories are first person narratives. You might think this would compromise the language, but it doesn’t and this might be the true wonder of Shepard’s work. He can get away with beautiful descriptions without the language being too lyrical and distracting you from the work. For instance, in The Zero Meter Diving Team, the narrator Boris describes his severely contaminated brother who was inside Chernobyl when it blew saying, “he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from rich tropical wood.” It’s a great line but it doesn’t slow the pace or bring the reader self-consciously out of the pleasure of reading.
In the two Russian stories, Shepard also captures spot on the sort of fatalistic sense of humor particular to Eastern Europeans (Actually, South Americans have this sense of humor too. Just about everybody besides Americans). When Boris visits his youngest brother, Petya in the hospital, the latter is clearly glad to see him but gives him a hard time:
“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course I am,” I told him.
“With you sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he said.
The fate of the two sick brothers is another nice touch. Petya, who Boris thinks is lazy, is confined to his apartment on a pension with his cigarettes and his tape player and no one to nag him. Mikhail, who always had problems sleeping, is finally able to rest.
But my favorite character is Solovyova, the backup female cosmonaut in the story Eros 7 whose stolid exterior hides a fascinating personality. Her answers are always calculated and spoken when the women’s superiors are within earshot. And yet she’s always needling the narrator, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who has been chosen to be the first female in space. Valentina falls in love with Bykovsky, a male cosmonaut in the same program and Solovyova is not only aware of it, she’s jealous and perhaps in love with the narrator. At one point she chastises the narrator’s obvious feeling for Bykovsky. “Look at your absorption! It’s like a warped version of intellectual activity.” There’s a real sense of sadness in Solovyova, sadness for herself and her secondary position but also a sadness that her friendship with Valentina is ending. It’s in her silences and her farewell where instead of kissing three times, the two bang their helmets together.
Overall, it’s a really wonderful book, which I hope to reread soon.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Against the Dizay
I love to read but I’m a fairly slow reader. How slow? Well, that’s still to be determined. But I’ll give you an example. In 2006, I bought Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” exactly at midnight on November 20th at Skylight Books in Los Feliz (he’s my favorite author and Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are two of my favorite books). It was a typically weird Pynchonian gathering I had heard about from my mother-in-law who’s a librarian (shout out to Susie). A bunch of TP fans, sadly about ninety percent male (an exception was the Wife), paid for their books at the counter, then milled around until midnight. There wasn’t much interaction, just the feeling that we were “in” on something cool. I thought of a line of Pynchon’s from GR describing Roger Mexico: “eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer’s reflex”. TP would have liked it, although I didn’t see anyone resembling the man.
Anyway, upon our departure we encountered a woman who seemed to be sleeping on a bench. But it turns out she was only half-asleep. As we getting into our car, she sat up and said “Goodnight, murderers" in a voice reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch. Now, having lived in New York for 15 years, I have a pretty good feel as to when it’s pointless to engage the random street person and being addressed as a murderer is not a great jumping off point. I mean, yeah, a case can be made that Western affluence comes at the expense of people in the Third World but it’s not the type of discussion I want to have at midnight on a street in Los Feliz. I think it was Lou Reed who said the street is the dumbest place in the world. So we got in the car. Then, just to prove my point, as I pulled away from the curb, the woman tried to run after us, shouting “Wait, wait”. Of course, a couple of miles down the road we figured out what she was trying to tell us. One of our headlights was out.
I started in on ATD right away but I didn’t finish it in late July 2007. Now, it is 1085 pages and on several trips I took in between I didn’t lug it along. Our cat Grover also fell ill and died in January 2007 and that took a lot of wind out of my sails. But it shouldn’t have taken me eight months to read a book. This is my answer to my friends who think the idea of my trying to read 40 books in one year is taking the fun out of reading. They say I’m making it a chore and call me obsessive when I tell them of how I’ve composed a XL spreadsheet to help track my progress. Even my wife in mid-February floated the idea that I leave the Civil War subset for another year. I may yet. The point is if I don’t set a goal it will not get done. Not that I’m good about setting goals or even good about maintaining a certain pace. I’m not.
Of the several ideas I’ve had about how to keep myself on target the spreadsheet seems the best. But by the time I drew up the XL document, I realized I was already behind. Once totaled, I came up with the sum of 17384 pages. That averages out to about 50 pages a day. Seems doable except sometimes I don’t read 50 pages. Sometimes I read 30 or 20 or 5. Also, I’m not really sure how fast I can read (another experiment in the works). By the end of February I had only finished three books totaling 725 pages or four percent of my goal with the most embarrassing fact being that one of the books is a collection of short stories. A very good book I might add, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” by Jim Shepard. To date, I’ve also read “And a Bottle of Rum”, “Out Stealing Horses”, and “Mishima’s Sword”. I’m currently wrapped up in “Middlesex”. Completing that I will have read 1498 pages not even nine percent of the year’s goal. I have a lot of reading ahead of me over the next nine months.
Anyway, upon our departure we encountered a woman who seemed to be sleeping on a bench. But it turns out she was only half-asleep. As we getting into our car, she sat up and said “Goodnight, murderers" in a voice reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch. Now, having lived in New York for 15 years, I have a pretty good feel as to when it’s pointless to engage the random street person and being addressed as a murderer is not a great jumping off point. I mean, yeah, a case can be made that Western affluence comes at the expense of people in the Third World but it’s not the type of discussion I want to have at midnight on a street in Los Feliz. I think it was Lou Reed who said the street is the dumbest place in the world. So we got in the car. Then, just to prove my point, as I pulled away from the curb, the woman tried to run after us, shouting “Wait, wait”. Of course, a couple of miles down the road we figured out what she was trying to tell us. One of our headlights was out.
I started in on ATD right away but I didn’t finish it in late July 2007. Now, it is 1085 pages and on several trips I took in between I didn’t lug it along. Our cat Grover also fell ill and died in January 2007 and that took a lot of wind out of my sails. But it shouldn’t have taken me eight months to read a book. This is my answer to my friends who think the idea of my trying to read 40 books in one year is taking the fun out of reading. They say I’m making it a chore and call me obsessive when I tell them of how I’ve composed a XL spreadsheet to help track my progress. Even my wife in mid-February floated the idea that I leave the Civil War subset for another year. I may yet. The point is if I don’t set a goal it will not get done. Not that I’m good about setting goals or even good about maintaining a certain pace. I’m not.
Of the several ideas I’ve had about how to keep myself on target the spreadsheet seems the best. But by the time I drew up the XL document, I realized I was already behind. Once totaled, I came up with the sum of 17384 pages. That averages out to about 50 pages a day. Seems doable except sometimes I don’t read 50 pages. Sometimes I read 30 or 20 or 5. Also, I’m not really sure how fast I can read (another experiment in the works). By the end of February I had only finished three books totaling 725 pages or four percent of my goal with the most embarrassing fact being that one of the books is a collection of short stories. A very good book I might add, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” by Jim Shepard. To date, I’ve also read “And a Bottle of Rum”, “Out Stealing Horses”, and “Mishima’s Sword”. I’m currently wrapped up in “Middlesex”. Completing that I will have read 1498 pages not even nine percent of the year’s goal. I have a lot of reading ahead of me over the next nine months.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
the quest
A few days after Christmas last year I took inventory. Under the tree sat two stacks of books, peeking out from the sagging branches. I always ask for books and this year, like many past years, I had received several. While I contemplated what I wanted to read first I couldn’t escape the fact that similarly large stack remained ominously perched like steps to an invisible mountain castle, upon my bedside table. Included were three books I hadn’t finished: This is Your Brain on Music, Tree of Smoke and The Armies of the Night, which I had read twice before and was revisiting after the death of Norman Mailer.
I stood up and ventured over to our fiction bookshelf. In New York, it had dominated an entire wall of my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) apartment but here in Santa Monica, it barely took up half of one. Still, it’s big sucker, an inside-out construction built by my father-in-law with a spiny exoskeleton of ten 2X4s supporting 7 shelves. We had weighed the idea, in light of a possible earthquake, whether to anchor it to the wall. But the sheer weight of approximately 450 books (80 on the top shelf) has kept it sturdy.
At first glance, I could pick out at least dozen books I had received for Christmas and never read. There were the ones I had begun reading, liked and never finished (Cloudsplitter, Middlesex), monsters I had inexplicably asked for and received (The Unconsoled, Cryptomicon), and the random, unsolicited gift (John Grisham’s Bleachers, Magical Thinking by Augustin Burroughs, “Thanks, Sis”). I stood on a chair and started writing down the titles. Twenty books, mostly fiction.
Then I scanned the smaller bookshelf across the room that held some non-fiction plus a gaggle of Civil War books my wife had unloaded two years ago. I say unloaded because all eleven books, including Shelby Foote’s trilogy, arrived in a one, large, wrapped box. I am related to Ulysses S. Grant on my mother’s side and my wife, a history teacher felt I needed some reference. I added them to my list. Including the stacks under the tree, the two bookshelves I came up with 36. Eventually, I would add a few more buried in my office down the hall. 39. And so I decided, that over the next year, I would make it my project to try and read them all.
I stood up and ventured over to our fiction bookshelf. In New York, it had dominated an entire wall of my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) apartment but here in Santa Monica, it barely took up half of one. Still, it’s big sucker, an inside-out construction built by my father-in-law with a spiny exoskeleton of ten 2X4s supporting 7 shelves. We had weighed the idea, in light of a possible earthquake, whether to anchor it to the wall. But the sheer weight of approximately 450 books (80 on the top shelf) has kept it sturdy.
At first glance, I could pick out at least dozen books I had received for Christmas and never read. There were the ones I had begun reading, liked and never finished (Cloudsplitter, Middlesex), monsters I had inexplicably asked for and received (The Unconsoled, Cryptomicon), and the random, unsolicited gift (John Grisham’s Bleachers, Magical Thinking by Augustin Burroughs, “Thanks, Sis”). I stood on a chair and started writing down the titles. Twenty books, mostly fiction.
Then I scanned the smaller bookshelf across the room that held some non-fiction plus a gaggle of Civil War books my wife had unloaded two years ago. I say unloaded because all eleven books, including Shelby Foote’s trilogy, arrived in a one, large, wrapped box. I am related to Ulysses S. Grant on my mother’s side and my wife, a history teacher felt I needed some reference. I added them to my list. Including the stacks under the tree, the two bookshelves I came up with 36. Eventually, I would add a few more buried in my office down the hall. 39. And so I decided, that over the next year, I would make it my project to try and read them all.
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