I remembered just recently the exact outcome of my last reading challenge to myself, and why it got derailed. Babies. Well, baby, the singular, to be more specific. When Atticus was born it cut significantly into my free time, and it was easier to watch something on the TV while holding him during the long long nights of newborn boot camp than it was to hold a book, what with all the page turning. Maybe a kindle will make this easier, but I doubt it. I already have some long form games (helloooo new vegas!) saved up for the occasion, to help pass the staying-perfectly-still on-the-couch-til-4am-as-not-to-wake-the-baby-who-is-asleep-on-top-of-me-so-my-wife-can-sleep phase. The last time around I was foolish enough to think I wouldn’t lose that much free time, and that I would find time to read just as much as before. Pfffffff. This time I know what is coming, and my goal is to read at least one book each month to give myself something to write about. I know I started this with big talk about no goals or expectations, but I’ve become quite fond of writing these and want to give myself this one, very small goal, as to keep this going. Enough preamble, on to the books.
COMPLETED:
PRINCESS BRIDE - When I read a book, I have a feel for the characters and the places of the book in my mind. I don’t usually have a specific and portraitable image of them, but more a general idea of who they might be, or what I’ve seen that I can draw on to recreate the image in my imagination. I’m sure I am not alone in this, and I feel like this is one of the things that makes reading so endearing - the ability to make each story uniquely your own by transforming the printed words into the full story playing out in your mind’s eye. So take this book, one that I came to after I saw a very iconic film version of the book. I liked it quite a bit, and, like other great book to movie adaptations, I can see that lot of the quality of the film came from good source material. I felt a disconnect from it though because I wasn’t creating a personal version of the story in my mind, I was just reading a version of something I had already seen. It felt like an overly elaborate screenplay, or a transcript of the film. I think if the movie had been only average, or forgettable, or if I had only seen it once, or a very long time ago, it might not have been quite as bad - but I’ve seen princess bride the movie many times. It was impossible for me to picture any of the characters as any way other than the way they were cast in the film, and the points of the book that had been changed for the movie felt odd and out of place. I think the better the movie of a book is, the harder it becomes to either go back and re-read it again with your original mind’s eye story intact, or to read it for the first time and not have your story altered irreversibly. Can anyone go back (or for the first time) and read Mario Puzo’s the godfather and really have their own version of what don Corleone’s office looks like? Can you picture Luca coming and talking to the don in a voice that isn’t slow and deliberate? I certainly could not.
METAMORPHOSIS - I initially picked this just as something short to be able to finish quickly, because I was having a what should I read sort of crisis. Sometimes you need to cleanse the palette from whatever it is you read last to get back on track. I have heard about Kafka before, but this is the first of his I have ever read. I was surprised by this short story, and can understand now why people use his name as a general description for a type of book or movie. It painted such a clear emotional picture of despair and loneliness, and in such a singular way. I always like when I can read something made long ago and still identify with it; it reminds me that people have always been roughly the same, and will in all probability always be. People will always be worried about being alone or isolated by their families, or feel alienated by the world. People will always resent those that make their life harder, but feel guilt for doing so. Not about the same ideas as this, but I felt the same thing at the end of a tree grows in Brooklyn, as that book is about a lot of the same core issue most people have in their life today. I think that there is a certain type of art that is good because is will always be relevant to people no matter when they take it in, and that the metamorphosis is that sort of art.
This author seems like one of the missing pieces from a larger puzzle regarding categorizing a sort of story I enjoy, but have always had difficulty describing to people. The two authors I link together in this regard are Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathan Lethem. Though both write excellent science fiction, both also write stories that occupy what I always thought of as the space between hardcore genre fantasy/sci-fi and real literature. They have well written stories where fantastic things take place without being the defining aspect of the entire book. Or, you could say it is a book with magic (or whatever the science fiction equivalent of magic is) in it without being a book about magic. Upon further research I have now learned that there is a term used generally to describe this type of book: magic realism. Though there seems to be some debate as who is included in this genre and who is a writer of strict fantasy, I think the through line for me is the use of a fantastic element to examine something more deeply or to expose some manner of truth. Neither of the authors I listed are considered part of this movement, but Kafka is mentioned as one of the first major authors of this sub-genre. It seems that most people who write about this type of book use one hundred years of solitude as their go to example of magic realism, so I guess I should probably read that soon. Oh, the book itself. Don’t turn into a giant lobster-roach, or everyone will hate you and you will die.
YOU MIGHT BE A ZOMBIE - In addition to reading books, I also read a fair amount of the Internet. I view it as the new magazine; small to medium length pieces to look at or read, of varying topic and worth. This is a book by the writers at cracked.com, a strangely compelling site full of top 5 and 10 lists of facts, stories, and humorous editorializing along the way. I remember cracked as being the poor man’s mad magazine, but it seems like they went the right route when compared tot heir old rival by getting good writers and a website, as opposed to a relatively shit sketch show. The problem with the magazine parts of the internet is that I read it like I would a magazine, skipping past all the boring bits and ads to get to what I’m really there for. This book immediately tripped my internet reading brain, and I skipped freely past anything that I wasn’t interested in, or already knew a bit about (I seem to a bit about a lot, it seems). VW was founded by the nazis? SKIP. The Milgram experiments were pretty scarSKIP. We went to war a bunch of times over bananaSSSSKKKKIIPPPP. Not to say I didn’t enjoy the parts of the book I read, on the contrary I liked them quite a lot. I just couldn’t read it like I do a book, not anymore, the internet has changed my light reading patterns. I’m not going to do full write-ups of them, but I also started and then did not finish after reading about a fifth of what white people like the book, and something called the book of general ignorance. They were both full of less interesting and less funny things that the cracked book. Also, too snarky, and too poorly formatted, respectively. So, short version: do you like the internet? Yes? Read this.
THE GAME - When I fist set out to read this, I was under the impression that it was a bullet-pointed sort of affair, a list of pickup strategies and techniques to use on women in order to bypass their built in genetic defenses against being picked up in a bar. Not that I need to learn how to better pick up women at this stage in my life, but I had read a bit of a debate on penny arcade a while back and this was mentioned there as an interesting jumping off point on this subject. The debate there was between the camps of “this is a bit greasy-seeming, predatory almost” and “some guys are sort of awkward and just need a bit of assistance when it comes to talking to girls”. It sounded interesting, so I set out to read it as an anthropologist would study lower primates and learn from their interestingly simple ways. It turned out to be quite a bit more interesting than I had originally made it out to be. After about 100 pages (no real idea, 800 locations? What is that worth in honest to god book pages?) I was ready to give it up, as instead of an easily readable manual of secretive pickup tactics, it was looking to be a long form story about this one man’s rise to conquering all of the ladies in the greater Los Angeles area. What I did not realize at the time was that this was merely the first part of the goodfellas pattern of normal things, followed by awesome things, followed by shitty things, followed by somewhat normal things again. It gets away from a celebration of picking up women as a system capable of being broken down and learned, and gets into the ramifications of living your life this way. All the things I was feeling sort of gross about in the beginning were eventually dealt with later on in the book. Many of these men are left pretty unhappy with their romantic lives, as all they have ever focused on is getting everybody's pants off as best they can. Consequently, they failed to form any real lasting relationships, or even knew to look for somebody they might, at some point, want to talk to. In the end I felt not-scuzzy about reading this, and saw some merit in the systems they are selling. Not the silly lingo, or the itemized lines and moves, but some of the more basic lessons are ones that many young men would do well to learn if they are having trouble meeting women. They make a point to stress good personal hygiene, having relatively new and clean clothing, and having things to talk about if you plan on talking to new people. All solid advice, I think, and not just for picking up women, but for not being a gross bastard. The people who have a profit to make of teaching lonely men their supposedly fool-proof love techniques would be the first to claim that these will work for anyone who follows them to the letter, no matter how awkward looking or acting he may be. I’m not sure that is really how it is, some of it will always come down to natural charisma and looks, but there is certainly room for growth. The real question I wonder about is would I as a younger lonelier man have been drawn to trying out these tactics, and would they have worked? Probably, and sadly, also probably.
