November

I was correct last month in predicting that this month would be a struggle, though it ended up being for reasons different that I had thought. Instead of the reading being interrupted by my other hobbies, it was the writing that became the chore. I made time to read in the nooks and crannies of my day, but the writing could only be done in my precious late night free time, which was the time occupied by children, games, and sleep. I ended up getting most of it done longhand during down-times at work, and then having my lovely wife type it up for me - as she put it, don draper style. Next month will mark one full year of this project, and it will be the first time that I kept with a reading goal for the duration of the year. I am proud of myself, and proud of what my writing has become, especially compared now to where it started. The first few months are almost embarrassing in their brevity, and maybe at some point I'll have to re-read a few of them to give them a more thorough review. Next month’s post will be like the rest of the year, one big monthly post, but I think at the turn of the year I’m going to change the format of the blog. What I’m going to do starting next year is do away with monthly posts, and just post an individual review for each book I read. Maybe I’ll still do a monthly wrap up, but it would be no more than links to whatever I already put up in that month. Any constructive input or thoughts are, as always, appreciated. Unless what you have to offer is your typical sort of blind Internet assholery, in which case, go fuck yourself.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes you read a classic and you can’t understand the fuss. Not so here, as this is a fuss I now understand, and this book deserves every accolade I have ever seen heaped on it. The writing, oh my god, the writing. It makes me want to stop right now, shut the laptop and go outside, because I know I will never ever make anything as poetic and beautiful as the prose in Lolita. The writing is closer to poetry than to the prose I am used to reading in most books, even from good authors who have an excellent command of the language. Nabokov is not writing this book to tell you a story, instead it is more like he is painting a picture with words. It is meant to be taken in, appreciated slowly. The problem this creates is that at times, this tendency not to rush, but to let each sentence flourish and bloom makes telling a cohesive story difficult. Rather, more specifically, it makes following the story at times difficult. Towards the end of the book, when I really want to know what is happening, and there are mysteries left to be solved, the book is in no more a hurry to move along then when it is in the beginning, setting the scene, lingering in each place that needs lingering. The last quarter of the book is like being stuck behind a slow moving yet beautiful woman at the airport. Yes, yes, the view is wonderful, but please could you hurry up a bit? It seems as if you are being challenged to not care about the plot, as it doesn’t have the sense of urgency that other books have when the plot naturally accelerates in light of a mystery or a conflict. Not that it wasn’t enjoyable, but whereas I was able to match the pace in the beginning, and linger along with the writing, towards the end it was hard to take the time I was required to take in order to enjoy each sentence - I wanted to speed up and find out what was really happening.

The subject matter was very interesting and multifaceted. Obviously an incendiary topic, but handled deftly enough to make this book rise above what could have been something written in very poor taste. The subject of relationship between a physically mature child and an adult is a curious one, with many shades of gray. As for illegality, the situation is clear in most cases, but the morality remains somewhat hazy, less so in the extremes. What happened here is one of those extremes, one that is rightly wrong in the eyes of the law. However, if she was 16, it might be different. She is still young, but is every person at 16 incapable of making those sorts of decisions? I’m not sure about that. Even in this case, it retains a small touch of the gray, as Lolita seems to have as much to do with the seduction as Humbert does. Clearly, most adults would have rebuffed her advances and removed themselves from the situation, instead of always angling towards it, and making conditions right for something sexual to develop. However it’s not written in a predatory sense, where he hunts and pounces with no interference from his young prey, instead she is the one who ultimately initiates all of the contact. It is made clear that he is used to watching from a distance and living in a fantasy world; I don’t think he would ever have been able to consummate any of his poorly chosen romances without any assistance. This makes it less than crystal clear to me, again - shades of gray. What also makes their relationship intriguing is its impermanence. Or you could say its impossibility. The impossibility doesn’t come from the law, or from normal societal taboos, at least not fully. The real challenge stems from the sorts of issues of compatibility that plague any relationship. Other than a physical desire for one another (or his physical desire for her along with her social desire for him, or whatever you might call it) there is virtually nothing they have in common. He is an intelligent man, well read - while she wants to read celebrity magazines and go to the mall. It makes this relationship more than a very poor idea borne out by a confused man and an equally confused child, it becomes symbolic of our worst sorts of yearnings, the sort that have no basis in logic or reality. To want something that doesn’t make you happy, or something you didn’t even want in the first place is a very normal problem, but no less destructive because of its ubiquity. I have these sorts of desires all the time, looking back into the past and longing for things that I can’t hope now to change or replay. I waste mental energy on that sort of thing more than I’d care to admit. Why do I spend so much time thinking warmly about things now that didn’t really make me happy even when I did them in the first place? Or, in a related sense, why do I want things that I know aren’t any better than what I currently have? At least I have the good sense not to act on these sorts of idle daydreams that everybody suffers from. The protagonist of this story, however, seems to draw much of his life’s difficulty from his inability to separate his reality from his fantasy. In this way what at first seems like a tawdry story about an ill conceived romance comes to stand in in for universal issues that most people struggle with. The more you layers you peel away from this story, the more layers that lie beneath it, waiting to be uncovered.

Reading this has made me re-evaluate how I approach certain classics. What I realized was that I am primarily interested in stories and characters - good writing is not a priority, but more like a bonus I will welcome. This is how I get pulled into competently (or poorly) written thrillers or memoirs. I have never had a love of poetry, which to me has always seemed like the printed equivalent of talking to hear yourself speak- it seems taken with itself. What this book did, for most of its duration, was to make excellent us of its high concept linguistic acrobatics to tell an engaging story. What I got from it was the privilege of reading incredible writing- something I really enjoyed. I know there are other classics out there praised for their writing specifically, and what has changed for me is that I might give them another chance, but focus more on what I am really reading them for. The actual words and sentences first, story second. My hope is that in the same way that this book lured me in with a story to give me the words, another book may have an excellent story to tell if I read it slowly, savoring each turn of phrase without pushing forward to find out what happens next. I guess I have learned to stop and smell the word rose, so to speak.


Rule of Four - Ian Caldwell

When I got this book, around its publication date, it was presented to me as a book taking its cues from the DaVinci code. In some ways, this comparison holds up, it is about a modern mystery set against the backdrop of Renaissance works being investigated. This is certainly what would make the comparison be drawn, but there is much more that separates them than this. This book, though in it there is a murder mystery, and a 400 year old book being decoded, is much more a story of a young man leaving college. It takes place at Princeton and like all strongly placed novels, I’m certain the book is much richer to anyone who went there. To the outsider it’s still a nice slice of Ivy League life. The author made the university’s rituals and peculiarities feel real and unique, making it feel like the sort of establishment that is old enough to have rock solid traditions that nobody really questions or understands any more. He admits in the end that he took a few liberties with some of the details of campus life, but mostly he tried to stay true to what life at Princeton was like to an undergrad.

The actual parts going through the ancient text and its secret meanings are fine, however, it seems less like a mystery you could work out, and more like a second story, mirroring the first. While this in itself is not a bad thing, the book is set up around these boys solving the mystery of this book that nobody else has figured out yet, and it seemed appropriate to let the reader try to puzzle some of it out. The real meat of the book to me is how well realized the main character is. He is a young man trying hard not to follow in his father’s footsteps, both personally and professionally. By the end he realizes how futile it seems to fight against that destiny. His father’s first love was this enigmatic Italian book (the Hypnerotomachia) and the son turned away from it as long as he could. Even once he let the book in to his life he made promises to himself and others to not let the book hold sway over him as it did his father. The boy and his father are good representations of the sort of people who have desires in their lives so strong, they overlap with romantic desires - not enough love to spread between people and things. Both the main character and his father have relationships fail because of their personal white whales they are compelled to chase. I think the author does a good job being honest about this and gives you an ending more in line with what might happen in a scenario like this instead of making the ending truly satisfying. You leave the story with a very clear impression of the difficulty one runs into trying to balance actual interpersonal love with one’s hobbies, passions and personal quests.

Year Of The Flood - Margaret Atwood

The is an alternate storyline to a book I read last month, Oryx and Crake. Set in the same world, covering roughly the same time-span, this book expands greatly on what was happening in other parts of the word during the events of Oryx. The highest praise I can offer this book is that it manages to stand apart from its companion without feeling tacked on or unnecessary. Even though there are characters who appear in both books, this manages to tell its own unique story, for a book like this seems like an accomplishment. This book is a well written piece of near future science fiction. It does a great job of making things seem different enough to know that things are advanced past where we are right now, but not so far flung that it seems out of the question to occur in my lifetime. I think that this world could handle another story line in it, though I wonder if it needs to intersect so directly with the existing story line in the way that this book did. The world is well realized and well expressed, and I would be interested to read more about the events that happened either before or after the flood (not really a flood, but a man-made plague).

The previous entry told the story of a man’s downfall due to hubristic scientific advance from the point of view of those responsible, this one is the story of others who see the coming disaster and try to prepare for it. The group about which the story takes place is somewhere between a hippie commune and a doomsday cult who focuses of natural living and a conscious rejection of unnatural and processed products. The group in this book (the gardeners) are presented in the same neutral fashion that the scientists were in the last book, letting you form your own opinions about them without having the author write them in a heavy handed manner in order to influence your feelings towards them. Given this sort of end of the world scenario other authors would be quick to assign some sort of blame, making it clear who is at fault for the downfall or more specifically who is right and who is wrong. Both sides here, both for and against unchecked advancement are not without faults of logic and action. Many of the members of the Gardeners break the core principles of the group routinely and their commitment to the cause is questionable. Many prove to be hypocrites, for when given chances to live in the gated compounds or take advantage of the comforts that science has granted society as a whole, they jump at them with no hesitation. Especially after the plague hits they are quick to use anything useful regardless of its origin. It makes it seem like when money is on the table they will use whatever is at hand, principles be damned. This ambiguity was endearing to me as it made the story seem more plausible - once society collapses so do its rules, no matter where you stood previously.

The end wasn’t bad by any means but it drastically changed how I viewed the end of the previous book. The story lines meet up in a very direct sense and offer resolution to the ending in Oryx, one which I felt was purposely inconclusive. At about 95% complete we see the ending scene as it was left standing in Oryx and then its resolution, which now makes perfect sense as there were people involved with it in the previous book whose identities you didn’t know then, but do now. The problem for me was that it was nice not knowing, the ending was effective as a mystery. While I certainly was curious about the outcome after the first books’ ending, it was like a well preformed magic trick - not knowing the secret is part of the charm. Once you get to peek behind the curtain and see what the gimmick is, your curiosity may be satisfied but at the expense of the wonder and mystery that uncertainty can lend a story.