my year in short stories, with a bunch of quotes

Although I’ve made good-faith efforts before, I’ve never read more than a few short story collections in a year. Something changed this year: twelve collections and I enjoyed the hell out of them.

Would recommend to anyone:
The Turning by Tim Winton
I haven’t shut up about this book since I finished it, and I don’t plan on stopping. Winton has an earthy, grounded voice that slid into my head so quickly that I would forget that I was reading within a few sentences of picking it up. That is a very rare happening—I can settle into that state of enchantment through big tense plots and believable characters, but it happens only once every few hundred books due to voice alone. I know close to nothing about Australia, so I don’t know if the settings and situations would be as novel for someone who has visited, but I’m not sure it would matter. His transitions are smooth, I never doubted any story or motivation, and the links between stories were delicate and faint. And my god, the writing.

“Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, bellows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has traveled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the water. Perhaps time moves through us and not us through it. Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Along with Chaon’s Await Your Reply, this book is on everyone’s best of the year list, and for good reason: Tower’s stories are fresh and funny and exciting at the same time that they are touching and painful. The title story and “Leopard” in particular are worth checking out, even if only while standing up in the new books section and trying to decide if you’re the sort of person who reads short stories. I can think of an image from each story that will stick with me—the aquarium, the woodwork, the guy with the beers at the river.

Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories
Most of these are short and barbed. The long ones are barbed too. They all hooked me right in the throat. Hempel’s work is what I wanted Lydia Davis’s to be (not that Davis is bad: her stories just aren’t what I thought they would be based on the reviews I’d read). This hefty book is full of dogs and mental health issues and the importance of language. Killer sentences and perfect endings, with a few bonus connections between stories (even ones pulled from different books) for the observant.

“I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
This is easier, I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less—not more—careful. We can say everything.
Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. Having delivered myself of the manly analogy, I see it to be not a failure, but a lie. How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you. These sounds—this letter—it is my lipstick, my lingerie, my high heels.
Writing to you fills the days in this place. And sometimes I long for days when nothing happens. ‘Not every clocktick needs a martyr.’”

Also great:
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
I’d been meaning to read this for literally years, but it was never in the used stack, never in the library when I looked for it. It’s a tiny little book, only took me two distracted days. Linked stories of destruction and blasé mayhem by a single narrator—this man has serious substance issues, a total lack of future goals or plans, and a surprising evil streak. Though it was in keeping with their characters, every time one of the men would do something awful, I was shocked because Johnson had pulled me into sympathizing with them again. I also read Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, which owes something to this collection (while not being overly derivative—I enjoyed both), in January. The ending of Johnson’s first story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” takes my breath away.

“It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among the rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain
So good and deserving of all the attention it got. Themes that held across stories: characters in dangerous locales who despite their best efforts are mired in naivety, the near impossibility of affecting larger situations regardless of how hard you try, surrender. A couple of the stories weren’t as flawless as the best of the collection, but the good ones make those couple worth it. Again with the initial story being amazing.

“How does it feel to be free? They were rising, rising, they might never stop—Blair closed his eyes and let his head roll back, surrendering to the awful weightlessness. Like dying, he wanted to tell them, like death, and how grieved and utterly lost you’d feel as everything precious faded out. That ultimate grief which everyone saves for the end, Blair was spending it, burning through all his reserves as the helicopter bore him away.”

Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill
I blogged about this one already (though never returned to it because I’m a lazy liar): again, a couple of flawed stories don’t come close to ruining the whole batch. Gaitskill does marvelous things with cold: chilly characters, people frozen into bad patterns, the cooling of relationships. I love the way she writes about sex (especially failed sex) and the tragic incompatibility of characters’ sexual proclivities and what they want in their partners. I also read her Because They Wanted To early in the year but took inadequate notes and remember almost nothing in the wake of the newer collection.

“We were nothing to each other, really. I rarely thought of her, and although she said otherwise, I doubt she thought of me except when she saw me. And yet from time to time, in a little pit with a shimmering curtain, we would discover a room with a false back, and through the trapdoor we would willingly tumble, into a place where we were not a mere addendum to another, more genuine life—a place where we were the life, in this fervid red rectangle or this blue one.”

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliott
Speaking of kink… Only marginally fiction, the most appealing facet of this collection isn’t all the filthy sex (and there is a lot of filthy sex, enough for the book to end up in the Erotica section in some stores), but the harsh honesty about the shortcomings of everyone involved. Broken people breaking each other for the occasional moments of being whole and unbroken together

“I wanted her so badly. I wanted her to adopt me. I could stay in her bed with her and her fiancé who ignored her. I didn’t care. What I really wanted to say was that I loved her and I thought there was a way we could make it work, that there’s a solution to every problem, when of course there isn’t.”

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
I was ready to dislike this collection because I’m a huge litfic snob with a low tolerance for whimsy and re-imaginings and fairy tales and magical realism. Here’s an even more snobby thing: when something is this good (see also: Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart), I start thinking it’s just that the rest of the genre isn’t well-written enough to make the grade. This is terribly unfair and a character failing on my part, but at least I’m still trying. Right? Hmm.

If I had read individual descriptions of these stories before reading them, I would have guessed that I would hate the very ones I ended up loving. A redo of Cinderella? A man in a hotel beyond the grave? A cousin who can disappear? A ghost in a fucking cello? Pass pass pass pass. And yet.

“I loved you the first time I saw you. Scarecrow, my dear scarecrow, I loved you best of all. Who would have predicted that we would end up here in this hotel? It feels like the beginning of the world. This time, we tell each other, things are going to go exactly as planned. We have avoided the apple in the complimentary fruit basket. When the snake curled around the showerhead spoke to me, I called room service and Miss Ohio, the snake handler, came and took it away. When you are holding me, I don’t feel homesick at all.”

Hit and Miss:
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
My expectation were a bit too high going in here. Quirky stories, but never over the edge into cutesy or kitschy. Okay, maybe once or twice. The final story, “How to Tell Stories to Children,” was a blockbuster. She handles details really well and deals with the sorts of characters who are on the fringes of functionality and are frequently unaware of it—or are using maladaptive coping skills and hanging on as tight as they can given what they have.

“We don’t know anything. We don’t know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn’t force her. I wouldn’t have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don’t know anything. Call me when you’ve cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I’ll listen.”

The Boat by Nam Le
“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the first story in the book, is so brilliant that it obliterated the rest of the stories in the collection. They didn’t stand a chance. Other than a few sections of the one set in Tehran and the Vietnamese boat people piece, I was forcing myself through. No comparison at all. That first story is a fucking killer. It gets two quotes:

“If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.”

“At sixteen I left home. There was a girl, and crystal meth, and the possibility of greater loss than I had imagined possible. She embodied everything prohibited by my father and plainly worthwhile. Of course he was right about her: she taught me hurt—but promise too. We were two animals in the dark, hacking at one another, and never since have I felt that way—that sense of consecration.”

One of the few books I abandoned this year was a short story collection, Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore. I can’t really explain why these stories never caught me (I got to page 85 before it was due and I didn’t check it back out) as they are intricate and polished. Maybe too polished? I didn’t feel anything for the characters, even as I realized the mastery with which Yoon was moving them through their stories. There is also the possibility that I picked it up at the wrong time—readers I generally agree with admired it.

I’m going to try to keep up with the collections in 2010 and have a list of them to get around to. A sampling: Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, Barrett’s Servants of the Map, Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Winton’s two other collections if I can find them, and DFW’s Oblivion, which I stopped myself from finishing early this year so I’d still have it waiting for me. Further recommendations are welcome.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld, quotes, thoughts

“It is necessary to respect what we discard.”

I did not like Underworld. DeLillo has written two books that I love: White Noise and Libra both blew me away. I expected the same from Underworld despite warnings that it wasn’t worth the time or energy. But I have a copy, a big hardcover 860-page brick, and it’s on all the lists (bestseller, National Book Award nominee, runner-up for the New York Times best book of the last 25 years), and it’s this and that and really, how could I not at least try? Besides, I have a hard time getting rid of books, regardless of how good the home they will go to, until I’ve read them. I picked it up in late February or early March, settled in for a long slow read while I read other books in the foreground.

“Pain is just another form of information.”

The book starts with the 1951 Giants v. Dodgers game which I only know from the screaming “the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” broadcast. Baseball: not my sport. Sports: not my subject. It will get better after the game, I told myself as I slogged through the long first chapter. At a couple of pages a day, even baseball is readable. (Now that I’m thinking about it, The Brothers K by David James Duncan was about baseball and was fantastic.)

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”

How beautiful is that? There are lovely sentences here and there throughout the novel, graceful paragraphs, even a few whole sections that pulled me in. It wasn’t enough for the length, and the scattershot bits of plot didn’t pull together enough for me to get hooked on the story or characters. “If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock.” At some point around page 600, I started to tire of even the characters I liked. I had a brief conversation about big books recently, and though I defended them, I can see how this one just went and went for the sake of going.

“We were restless and grasping, we were a fling that had run intermittently for two years only because we lived in different cities, and we were religious in our attachment to risk, and she was the last thing I needed in this world.”

The point at which I liked Underworld the most was right after I finished it, when I read reviews and the Wikipedia page. The four-paragraph Wikipedia plot summary almost made me change my mind about the book—not because it explained plot points that I had missed or added to my understanding, but because, stripped of the literally hundreds of pages of extraneous scenes, DeLillo has a fierce little story with a handful of interesting characters. They were so diluted by everything else, however, that it took the summary and a few reviews for me to acknowledge that.

There are things I’m not writing about this year. There are stories I spent a couple of weeks in, got to know the characters of, saw images for, and dreamed about that I abandoned because they were too close to the things I’m not writing about. I read Underworld for most of this year, and the book revolves around themes that I tripped over the whole time: loss, risk, and waste. Sentences like the ones above and below would come along and touch/punch me, but then we were back to 20-page discursions with minor characters. Maybe, a different year, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed.

“I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.”

gratitude, dreams, books in the wings

I had a moment at the library earlier today when one of the nice librarians handed me a stack of requested novels. All this literature, for free, to my desired location. She seemed a little confused by it, but I handed over (for the donation box) all the change the parking meter graciously spit out at me–two dollars more than the quarter I put in.

going:
–Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. About halfway done (this is a substantial book), and though I like the protagonist, there is something overworked about occasional paragraphs and not-urgent about the plot that keeps me from bolting whole chapters. I’m about to run out of time on my check-out, but I’ll request it again and finish it off.
–Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet. So into it. A good sign: I had a prolonged and involved dream about avoiding spoilers for the novel. In my ideal subconscious universe, one has to work hard to avoid public discussion of literature. A few months ago, I woke up with a flaming message from dreamland that I must read Jim Harrison. Harrison wasn’t on any of my booklists; I hadn’t heard an interview with him and couldn’t remember a single fact or title of his. But something snuck in, and I respect that. Up next, when I clear out my request queue: The Road Home.
–David Copperfield by Dickens is my new slow-read. Why? It’s huge, and I could do with that space on the fiction shelves. (And it seemed more night-reading friendly, on first paragraph, than the other big books I was considering.)
–You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem. Loaner from Ian/Mo, and they weren’t kidding, the pages fly past. I feel like I’ve been reading for all of seven minutes, yet I’m more than a third done. Light, but not in a way that feels like I’m wasting my time. I’m not quite a Lethem fanboy (I’m told I should check out Fortress of Solitude to rectify that)–a couple of his other books bothered me in ways this one is not.
–just picked up today: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, and Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Using any time-management reading strategy* at all, I would start the Jelinek, get maybe 30 pages in, then read Morrison in a day, and only then pick up the Chaon. But oh, I love Dan Chaon’s books and everyone else has to wait.

coming:
–books on request, a long sentence with parallelism problems: still waiting for Houellebecq fan to return The Possibility of an Island, the yearlong battle with a Winnicott hater for Home Is Where We Start From continues (seriously, she has started making snarky comments in the margins about his penis during the interims when she request-snatches it back from me), The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller (I gave up on The Appointment, hoping this one is more accessible), Asterios Polyp is on all sorts of best lists so I’m joining in, the new Mary Karr memoir Lit (only 45 people ahead of me in line!), Cynthia Ozick’s Art & Ardor because someone mentioned it on Twitter, and the memoir A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke because Stephen Elliott gave it a great write-up.
–at home: several Tim Winton books (really, again, The Turning, magnificent, check it out), one of the two Meg Wolitzer books I have, Salter’s Light Years, still with Toibin’s The Master (though I feel like I should read James’s The Ambassadors first because I picked it up for a quarter last week and why not). I looked over my shoulder at the bookshelf to see what else and was overwhelmed. Everything.
–trying to finish up my thoughts on Underworld tomorrow and formulate some on Gravity’s Rainbow as an excuse to batter the internet with quotes. I’m considering a year-end list, but there are weeks left to go, and who knows, maybe something marvelous will come along before then.

*That sounds like a great heap of fun, doesn’t it? Yet it doesn’t seem to suck any of the enjoyment or magic out of my reading, only allow for more of it.

a month!

Novels I finished in the interim, with a thought or two:
–Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses was perfect. Best book this year, possibly.
–I really, really needed the romping fun of Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.
–I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get into Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, knowing there were re-imagined fairy tales and fantastic stories. But with a couple of exceptions, these stories blew me away.
–After reading the article by Alexander Chee I mentioned in my last post, I checked out his novel, Edinburgh. Lovely writing, a main character I miss having around, and Chee is a very nice guy online, it turns out.
–The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Hmm. Well.
–Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers lived up to the hype. Most of the people I’ve talked to in person about Powers dislike his writing, but I really like how knotty and issue-driven the two books I’ve read are.
–Jim Harrison’s The English Major was fun and occasionally delightfully vulgar and didn’t hurt my brain while also not insulting my intelligence. A good combination. I had a dream a while back that I must read Harrison. This is the first book I’ve picked up, and it bodes well for my subconscious’s demand.
–I have no idea where I got the recommendation for Daniel Menaker’s The Treatment, but I’m glad I followed through. Wasn’t life-changing or awe-inspiring, but an enjoyable read, and I’d read him again.
–And the monster: I finished DeLillo’s Underworld. Which I’ve been reading since at least March, every day, a handful of pages. There is a massive hardcover-shaped hole in my daily routine right now. I didn’t like the book. Still thinking about it.

Currently reading:
–Gravity’s Rainbow drags on. It wasn’t dragging until sometime last week. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the madcap goofy episodes, I miss the characters from the first third (I’m feeling taunted by their brief reappearances and then redisappearances), and I’m feeling occasionally abused by Pynchon. I’m behind about 30 pages on the schedule, which I need to catch up this weekend or I predict I won’t finish on time.
–Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips was my (losing) pick for the National Book Award fiction winner this year because the first half has been delicate and compelling. I haven’t hit the place where I can’t put it down, but every day when I sit down with the book, I enjoy the pages I read. I think of the characters while I’m walking, away from the book.
–Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. Again, not hooked, but liking the characters. The indie-publisher lack of proofreading is distracting, unfortunately.
–Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart *is* making me want to sit with it all day, preferably in a location that would qualify as vacation. I would love to read this book in an airport, or on someone else’s couch. In the first 15 pages: J. Robert Oppenheimer wakes up in a motel room in 2003, with no memories since the Trinity atom bomb test. I cannot wait to see what happens, and I’m happy this is a solid chunk of pages, so there is space to get there.

That’s it! Four books! I can’t remember the last time that happened. My next big force-read might be Ulysses, or maybe War and Peace, or possibly The Tunnel or London Fields or Snow. Multiple contestants (ohmygod I need to read everything right now ohmygod), but after Underworld, I need a week or two off.

#gravrain get-together, absinthe, articles about writing

The Gravity’s Rainbow meet-up last night in San Francisco was excellent. I talked Ian (who loaned me the copy I’m reading and read it himself years and years ago) into coming with me, and a couple of amusing people joined us. By amusing I mean a man who is mysteriously off to China next week but knew Gravity’s Rainbow down to the pronunciation of “Nguarorerue” without looking at the page and had read every book I mentioned, and a Swedish mathematician who had never heard of the novel but is now sold and who had conversational digressions that were consistently fascinating. The only other attendant from the first meet-up, Quinn, was also there, and she did a lovely reading of one of the best passages thus far in the book (the Herero history section on pages 315-319 in the Penguin edition).

After a good hour of wide-ranging book chat interspersed with history lessons on why one should not try to occupy Russia, Quinn pulled out the absinthe kit for the Postmodernism Support Group part of the night. I’d never had absinthe, only seen all the fuss and production in movies. Special spoons! Fire! Melting stuff! The smell of burning plastic! If you could work in tying off a limb somehow, it would be most of the way to junkieland. There were four or five brands (all imported), and I preferred the blue and the green ones. Way to pay attention on the names, self. Those two were like Good & Plenty candy that grew up, got a job as a dominatrix, and is forcing you to do shots at knifepoint. Ian made many amusing disgusted faces: my favorites were “dog who has eaten a bee” and “cat with part of a cotton ball stuck to its tongue.”

—

Three nice pieces on writing from the last few days, all of them linked (Twitter, I’d guess) from people/places that I didn’t think to save. I pop open a tab and get to the reading at some later time, which doesn’t lend itself to giving credit. I’ll work on that.

1. “In Praise of the Crack-Up” by Jeanette Winterson. I have disagreements with much of this article (and anything that claims that mental illness is a necessary part of creativity), but the last bit, when she veers away from craziness and towards the deep pains that even sane artists suffer, is great.

Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the poems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss, and one has meaning. The fierce crashes that happen to many creative people when a piece of work is done (read Hemingway on this) come out of the sense that however good the work, it has not answered the loss.

The strange thing about creative work is that it can have enormous value for others while its maker is left ravaged. . . . Encounters with the real, in particular what we really feel, are something we generally try to avoid. Art mediates the encounter, allowing us to get nearer to our longing and our loss, to risk more, to dare more. Yet for the maker, the exposure is not mediated; it is total and terrifying.

2. “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life” by Alexander Chee. A fantastic short memoir. I particularly appreciate, about 70% of the way through, his discussion of his process and what he’s conscious of while composing. At that point I became of aware of how he was putting his sentences together and wanted to start all over again, see how it worked (and it does).

Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

All I could tell in that moment was that I had finally made an impression on myself. And whatever it was that I did when I writing a story, I wanted to do it again.

3. “How to Become a Writer: A Memoir” by Sonya Chung. Chung is scrappy, and optimistic, and still mid-stream—this is a story of coming late to the game, and the overwhelming importance choosing to read as much as possible.

I learned that to read books with your whole self is to become a real human being, and, possibly (when reading books actually becomes more real than life to you), an artist. Over the last 13 years or so, I’ve read widely, hungrily, obsessively. When I am reading a book as deeply as one should read a book—that is, when reading a book is literally more nourishing than eating food—everything is colored by what that book is doing to me, how it is changing the way I think and feel; and everyone around me needs to brace themselves, because the book I am reading is everything about who I am and what I care about for a time. “How are you?” might as well be “What are you reading?”

When someone I am getting to know says to me, “Wow, you read a lot, you are well-read,” I have to laugh. And when a student asks me how to become a writer—not in those words, of course, but by showing up to class, they are essentially asking me this—I say: read. Read good books. Read them all. (This is the most worthwhile impossible goal you can set for yourself.) And read them with your whole self. If you do not read, and with your whole self, you will not become a writer; you will never ever ever become a writer. Not a real one. Not a good one.

Working on it.

where I am

It’s been a while. I committed to the editing of my second terrible novel, and that is taking up some of my personal writing energy, but not enough to be a reasonable excuse. I’ve also decided to do the alphabetical memoir blog thing and have been working up a list of authors to filter it through: not so much writing on that yet either.

But I did just go pick up (through an unwelcome cloud of humidity) three books I had on hold at the library and one from the new fiction shelf. My habit when I get a stack of new books, whether from the library or the store or the amazing warehouse sale my preferred bookstore has once a year, is to stack them up on one side of me on the couch, examine the author photo and blurbs of each, and then read the first paragraph of each before it goes into my “read this next” pile. This batch:
–Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. I’ve been meaning to read this for as long as I’ve been keeping a booklist. It has always been checked out, or stolen, or on order and then checked out/stolen. Finally, one copy was returned and held for me. The first paragraph turned into the first page, and I had to remind myself that I can’t commit to it today. That’s a good sign. I’ll likely merge it into the mix tonight, once I’m more established with Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, which is flawless thus far (page 55).
–Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers. A few pre-publication pushes by Ed Champion helped me get my request in early enough to be holding the first copy that the library has. Ooooh, I love that. So crisp and clean. Terrible author photo, as always. Undecided on the first paragraph.
–Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips. The impulse check-out from the new fiction section. I think this book is up for the National Book Award (looking . . . yes, it is) and it felt like a right and proper thing to have read at least one of them. About the Korean War, which I know very little about, so interested right off in that. Blurb mania! Alice Munro comparing it to a diamond, Junot Diaz proclaiming it the best novel he’s read this year, Tim O’Brien saying it’s “the best new novel I’ve read in the last five years or so.” There is a table of contents with many small chapters, which I appreciate while reading so many books at the same time. First paragraph test went well. High hopes.
–The Appointment by Herta Muller. She just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and within half an hour of it being declared, I requested the novel. Sorry, 18 people behind me. If you are sensing an unhealthy and competitive fixation on the library request process, you are correct. I can see how people get fixated on Ebay auctions now. Anyway, it’s a little book, with a nice first page, and a slightly frightening author photo (interesting: the exact photo is nowhere to be found online—the pictures that show up in Google images are much better). Again, though, blurb mania! Except just for me: it’s gushed over by Andre Aciman, who wrote one of my favorite books of last year and a personal life-changer, Call Me By Your Name.

I have no idea how I will pick where to start, especially with The Master still staring at me from the shelf, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage begging for a read. This is how I end up reading eight books at a time.

I finished Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs yesterday, and I’m very conflicted about it. I don’t know whether to cobble together a couple of the reviews I’ve read that I agree with or take a whack at expressing my own vague issues with it. I really like Moore, and I’m not sure I liked this book by the end. Still chipping away at the monster trio of Gravity’s Rainbow (enjoyment level: up), Underworld (tolerance level: up, due to interesting J. Edgar Hoover chapter), and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (guesses-about-what-is-fucking-happening level: same). Happy and mellow with The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, my go-to fun book right now.

Good lord that’s a lot of books. Also, a lot of names with accents that I am too lazy to go copy-paste right now. Sorry, fancy-name authors.

“Wait” by Galway Kinnell

In the middle of an Amy Hempel story, a perfect line, from this perfect poem:

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

–Galway Kinnell

in progress

My current book stack is ridiculous. Eleven inches high. Only two not hardcover, and those two are massive. My hands ache from holding books open. At night, when I pick up the pile to transfer them to bed, I need both arms, and sometimes they tip towards me from the edge of the bed while I’m sleeping and poke at my ribs.

I remember a time during which I only read one book at a time, would tear through a single work in a few days even if I disliked it in order to get to the next book. Maybe college changed that? The every-quarter mess of heavy reading classes? Since at least 2000, I’ve had multiple books going. As long as they don’t overlap too much in theme or setting, it’s not a problem keeping track of them, but with this many, and so many of them good, it’s like being mobbed by a litter of really cute puppies—I want to pick them all up, but I don’t have enough arms.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. I just borrowed this from a most awesome and well-read member of my writing group. The short story in the New Yorker was nice, but it stalled at “nice” for me. The first handful of pages of the novel contain most of that story, but includes background and context that the excerpt cut. They shouldn’t have cut it. It’s much better than nice. I would like to spend all day with this book.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. Why oh why has no one ever pushed Hempel on me? These stories, most of them short-short and spare, are all sharp-fisted gut punches, dense with fresh detail and animals and these final sentences that tie up the pieces into clean knots right around my throat. I would like to spend all day with this book.

Underworld by Don DeLillo. I think I’ve been reading this book since Clinton was in office. Or at least five months. Two or three pages a night, over and over and over. I’m up to 480 (out of 825), and I only recognize a handful of characters. I’m not sure they are connected to each other, or if there is really any plot happening. There are some beautiful vignettes, patches of gorgeous writing.

“Pain is just another form of information.”

I would like to not have to spend any part of today with this book.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Still chugging along on schedule (see the right sidebar: it’s not too late to start!). The first few days weren’t so great, but I’ve found my footing. Instead of researching and note-taking and attempting to follow what might be happening (as opposed to what is probably a hallucination), I’m letting the prose wash over me and focusing on the images. Because my god, the images. Disgusting, obscene, vivid. He’s doing things with setting that more than justify the time it takes to get through ten pages a day. I wish more people in the Bay Area were doing the group read—I met Quinn on Wednesday to talk about it, and though we skipped around a lot, it was good times, and I’d like to share the experience more, especially with people who are doing the researchy bits I’m not.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Been on my shelf for years, never got past the first 30 pages. I’m more than half through now and enjoying it. It’s interesting to read a book that has been through the promise/hype/backlash/serious-double-strength-backlash cycle. It’s not what I was expecting, either from reading Eggers’s fiction or the considerable amount of criticism lobbed at it. I’m enjoying it, and if I had nothing to do today and no other books going, I’ll finish it in a long sitting.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. My first book by him. That seems strange, that I’ve avoided him this long. I picked it up based on Jade Park’s
brief review—I’m a sucker for books that blow you away on the last paragraph or sentence. This is a fast, hooky, entrancing read. I’m finding it very hard to put down, but all those other puppies, so soft, so demanding. I suspect I’ll lose some sleep in the next few days to get this one finished.

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. Only a dozen pages in, but I’m already stopping myself from taking great chunks out of this. What a charming premise, and in the midst of several books which aren’t about plot, I sense a good solid one here. Possibly recommended by Jen. I need to start noting on the list who said “read this now!” so I can thank/blame them when I finally get around to the book.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I’m still not entirely sure what is happening in this book, but I’m digging the hell out of it. I can see where some people could get bored with it all, and I wonder if I wasn’t reading Underworld and Gravity’s Rainbow at the same time, if I would be able to handle all the strange and cold ambiguity. The sex helps. As do the frequent scenes of almost unbearable horror and inexplicable plot turns. I have absolutely no idea where this book or its characters or the themes are going, but I would like to spend all day with it and find out.

Books I had to stop myself from starting yesterday because they are calling to me from my shelves: The Master by Colm Tóibín, The Position by Meg Wolitzer, and The Path of Minor Planets by Andrew Sean Greer. I sublimated that urge by requesting stuff from the library, so next week will see the arrival of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Light Years by James Salter, and, if the current patrons get off their asses and return the books, Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link (at long last) and The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq. You have no idea how many times I just had to look at that name to get it spelled correctly.

force-Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Within a week of the recent elections in Iran, I picked this book up free on the street. I couldn’t recall hearing anyone talk about it in person, but it seemed like I had heard good things from somewhere. So when I got to about page 20 and started to grit my teeth at getting to the end of each paragraph, I figured it was just me. I mentioned the book to a few of my heavy reader pals. They all hated it—I think only one of them had finished it. By this point, I was a quarter in, and man, I hate wasting reading time, so it went on my force-read pile.

Some of my previous force-reads have been classics I’m having a problem with (Middlemarch) but most of them are books that I started and would really like to get rid of. There is something in me that stops me from just tossing a book that I’ve invested more than a couple of days in, and if I’m motivated to get the thing out of my house, it has to get read. I try not to have more than one of these going at a time, but Underworld is going to be there for at least another several months, so two it was. For both of them, I would push down two pages a day. You can get through anything at two pages a day.

Here’s the problem with Reading Lolita in Tehran: I cannot stand the author’s voice. This is a huge and impossible problem in a memoir. She is even aware of it:

I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating.

Yup. What I was looking for—some further insight into what it was like to live as a woman and an academic in Iran—was there in only the flattest of ways. The way the book jumps around in time was confusing, the characters flat, and it was nearly impossible for me to feel an emotional investment in anyone. The discussions of the books tended towards her acknowledged pontification, almost like she had pulled directly from papers she had written, inserting a phrase or two (see italics, mine, below) to keep them from being too obviously yanked into memoir. Like this, which is a nice thought and one I marked, but a paragraph that sounds excerpted from an essay:

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

One good thing comes out of the months that it took me to chip through this book. I’m inspired to read The Ambassadors by Henry James now. When I was typing up my notes, I realized my favorite quote in the whole book was from another book—how could I not pick that one up now?

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. For it was a mistake. Live, live!

I will release the free book back to the sidewalk today and hope that its next home appreciates it more than I did.

it starts with a lie

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

I haven’t read this, and it will be weeks before I can get to it (I’m 17th on the waitlist through the library, and the single copy is still in processing). The Rumpus posted a fabulous interview with him today, and his description of his own short stories (“You know, sad people from the Midwest who are disturbed in some sort of existential way.”) reminded me of how much I loved his first novel and the collection Among the Missing.

The creepiest bird in all of literature lives in the second story from the collection, “I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me.” I don’t have great retention of short stories, even ones I love, but I remember nearly every scene from that one—frightening, layered, tense. Even the end scared the hell out of me. That entire book impressed me: big themes about parents who are inadequate despite their best efforts, mysterious losses, relationships that are short a piece or two that the people involved are unaware of or powerless to fix. All with taut, image-heavy writing.

Looking back at my book lists for the past few years, Among the Missing was one of the earlier story collections that I finished, and I’m thinking that it helped smooth the way to the my easier and more enjoyable time with them now. You Remind Me of Me, his first novel, was also amazing: my total notes for it are “fan-fucking-tastic.” I attempt to be a little more detailed nowadays.

Chaon Twitters at @DanChaon (does that count as a double “at”?), and following him has been worth it if only for the little tidbit he dropped a few days ago: it’s pronounced “shawn.” After years of alternating between spelling it out in every book conversation he came up in or mangling it (kay-on, chown, chon), I can finally recommend his work without feeling like an idiot.