What I've Been Reading and Thinking

There's a funny thing that happens to me when I read great literature. I wonder if it happens to anyone else. I become mute. I feel incapable of communicating with other people in any meaningful way. I live in my head and I immerse myself in more literary work that knocks me out. The author who first got to me this way was Marcel Proust, but David Foster Wallace just about finished me off.

I want to come back to this blog and to be present here and so to kick start myself, I'm going to try and make a little sense of the literary trip I've been on. The list of books I've read since I last posted has gotten too long to go into much detail about each book, so rather than do that I'm going to give a single thought on each. Let's see if my recent foray into Twittering can help me cut to the chase.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

This is the third of the seven volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The more I've read of him, the easier he is to read and the more awe inspiring he becomes. Once I finish Sodom and Gomorrah I'll be a little antsy because only the first four volumes of the newest translation have been published. I recently acquired Lectures on Literature by Vladmir Nabokov and among the seven fabulous lectures published from Nabokov's nearly twenty years teaching at Wellesley and Cornell is one on Swann's Way, complete with photos of the marked up book and class notes. Reading the notes of one master on another is exhilarating.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I'd not read any Muriel Spark but after reading this story, I'm a devotee. Fortunately, Muriel Spark was prolific and left many novels and short stories behind. Her work is funny and she was a woman ahead of her time who lead a fascinating life.

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

Mike Henry from Lighthouse Writers Workshop once said that Humboldt's Gift made him want to become a writer. I now know why. I read this book after reading The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that is now one of my favorites of all time. Saul Bellow was one of the finest American novelists who ever lived.

Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill

I loved Mary Gaitskill's novel, Veronica and I thought her story collection, Bad Behavior was brilliant. This new collection of short stories had a couple I loved, but it was a little uneven. Mary Gaitskill is a writer who makes my stomach tighten up into a knot. Her characters are damaged and the stories are raw. She scares me a little and I like that.

The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles

Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus -- all surprisingly engaging and readable. The plays help to fill in my educational gaps and they help me to finally understand all the references in Woody Allen movies.

The Iliad by Homer

I confess to putting this one down at about the halfway point, which was still quite a bit of reading. I've seen "Troy" and I get the gist of the story. Don't get me wrong, it is a great story and it too helps to fill in referential gaps, but at times it reads like a gigantic inventory of the names of every character involved in the Trojan War.

Columbine: A True Crime Story by Jeff Kass

This book (and another with a similar title) came out in April, ten years after the Columbine High School shootings. With distance and perspective, it's clear there were some inaccuracies that colored the original reporting on the killers. They weren't the victims of bullying they were first made out to be. Could anyone have predicted what they did? Based on what I read, I don't think so. I was surprised to learn that Harris and Klebold were actively planning the details of their attack on Columbine for over a year, which was ultimately what I found most chilling.

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton has a way of making sophisticated topics accessible to anyone, which I suppose is my way of saying that he can dumb down a discussion about Proust or philosophy and make them interesting to me. In this book, he's taken the problems of unpopularity, not having enough money, frustration, inadequacy, a broken heart and difficulties and offered consolation via the teachings of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The Consolations of Philosophy is an entertaining and educational form of CliffsNotes for the aspiring philosophy student.

Love My Rifle More Than You by Kayla Williams

This memoir was written by an Iraq veteran and Arabic translator who wrote the book while still in her twenties. Much of Williams' story is told around her frustration at the enlisted chain of command, frequently feeling she was taking orders from people who weren't very smart and about the sexual dynamics within the military. Any woman who has ever worn a uniform knows that to most of young male co-workers, she's either a bitch or a slut. The author talks about her experiences in Iraq, witnessing death and carnage and the toll that it takes, but it was her struggles as a woman that broke me down. I cried. The woman who wrote this book doesn't have perspective on her experiences yet and although she doesn't know it, she's got a lot of growing up left to do. She comes across as smart, tough, strong and a little cocky at times. I know her. I was her.

Erasure by Percival Everett

Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network did an excellent series of posts on each of the many works in Everett's oeuvre. Here is his post on Erasure. Erasure is about a black academic whose novels are obscure and considered inaccessible. In a bout of frustration, in one sitting he writes out a parody of the kind of black novel he disdains. It's full of stereotypical characters and street jargon. He sends it to his agent and to his shock, the publishing industry goes crazy for it. Percival Everett is one of the most prolific postmodern writers you've probably never heard of. Read him.

Halfway House by Katharine Noel

Set in a small town in New Hampshire, Halfway House tells the story of a teenage girl's sudden psychotic break with reality and the turmoil her mental illness brings to each of the four members of her family. Mental illness is treated with compassion and fidelity and Ms. Noel is a gifted writer.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

Of this debut short story collection I will only say that it's superb. If you are a fan of the form you must read this book. Here's what the New York Times Sunday Book Review thought of it.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is one of the finest short story writers writing today and in October I'll be fortunate enough to attend a writers studio event with her. Moore's stories are funny and they're sad. They're about ordinary people and they're usually in the midst of tragedy of some sort. Her characters are ordinary people. This interview in the Guardian provides a good sense of Moore and her work.

This Lovely Life by Vicki Forman

This poignant memoir is the most difficult book to write about. Vicki Forman is a writing professor and a blogger I came to know through her words before the book was published. This post at The Rumpus was my favorite of the reviews I read. Vicki gave birth to twins at 23 weeks and the story of what happened is about loss, grief, hope, struggle and ultimately about acceptance and love. There was so much that touched me personally and gave me a second chance with the time and the distance I now how to relive the loss of my own child in 1990. This story is tragedy and it's triumph and it poses questions about medicine and the law. It makes us take a hard look at what medicine can do, what we should do and who makes those decisions.

Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

I so loved Carleen Brice's debut novel that I wasn't sure how I could love Children of the Waters as much as I did Orange Mint and Honey. After finishing this novel in two sittings, I found there was nothing to worry about. Carleen outdid herself. The book's chapters alternate between two half-sisters with very different experiences and backgrounds. Brice handles both sides of a silent conversation about race that for most of us is remains a one-sided dialog. I feel like I often times am Trish -- the white character who, despite having black friends and family she loves will never be able to experience things from their perspective. Brice forces the sisters to work through the often unrecognized issues that in what some are calling a "post-racial" age, almost everyone continues to struggle with. Brice has again given us the fantastic Denver backdrop that she writes like no one else does. Children of the Waters is a great story that's beautifully written.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

It's here that I will cease my brief treatment of books. In my last post, I talked about my decision to join thousands of other readers to read Infinite Jest this summer and read it I did. I finished it within the first two weeks of the event and went on to tackle the remainder of his work (I've still got 2 1/2 books left). Millions of words have been dedicated to discussing Infinite Jest as well as his first novel, Broom of the System, his short story collections, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and Oblivion, his essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster and his exploration of the scientific concept of infinity, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.

Through Infinite Summer, online friendships have been made and an incredibly brilliant incites made in some of the smartest blog posts I've ever read. I found myself reading so many of them, nodding and saying "yes, I thought that too", but unable to contribute in any more coherent way. You'll note the title, This is Water listed among the books I read. I'd read this in its original form some time ago. You see, it was never intended as a book by Wallace, who took his own life at the age of 46 last September and it was published posthumously. It was originally delivered by Wallace as the commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 and you can read it in its entirety here. In light of the release of the book, it's quite possible you won't be able to find the speech on line much longer, so if you haven't read it and if you haven't read any of David Foster Wallace's work, I urge you to do so.

Reading Infinite Jest changed the way I look at literature and it made me stop working on the things I was writing so I could start over. Perhaps David Foster Wallace's worldview and his words speak so directly to me because we're of the same era, he born in 1962 and me in 1961. Maybe his unique take on the world, which was not just the dull irony and disdain for modern culture that I fear many of his imitators have given to us, but it was an almost embarrassed exposure of the absurd that was infused with both sadness and compassion and in the end, hope.

Wallace was not an imitator. He approached style and structure in a way that had never been done and that will never be done again. His work was at times the most difficult that I've ever read and at the same time, the most enjoyable. He made me work to read him and it was worth the work. Every person I've spoken to who has read Infinite Jest finished all 1,078 pages and immediately went back and re-read the first chapter. Some people have read the book three and four times. I know I'm likely to be one of them.

Thoughts on what I've been reading? What you've been reading? Recommendations?

The End of Spring and On to Infinite Summer

Blogging and working out are very similar in that if you stop doing either, the longer you wait to get back into the routine, the harder it is to get started again. I've been reading so many great books lately and since two of them were written by friends and published this month, I want to send some positive vibes about them out into the world.

I will dedicate separate posts to each of these fine books this week, but for now let me recommend This Lovely Life: a memoir of premature motherhood by Vicki Forman and Children of the Waters, Carleen Brice's second amazing novel. For now, I'll just say that both books touched me deeply and on a very personal level and I'll talk more about that and about these gifted writers and wonderful people when I post about each book.

In December of 2007 I did a post about my teetering TBR stack and I had a special category for cinderblock-like books that pose special challenges:

"Last, by by no means least, I have the titans. The long, hard tomes that I'd like to read for one reason or another. I suspect I'll save and tackle these big guys for vacations or in case I end up in a body cast and incapacitated for months on end. I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has read any of these books. I can see this picture doesn't show the titles well, so they're: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, All four Rabbit Novels by John Updike and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace."

I'm pleased to say that I've read the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust and I've finally been given the incentive to start Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

In early June, Matthew Baldwin launched Infinite Summer an online campaign challengingThis Lovely Life and Children of the Waters.

David Foster Wallace, who was known for his essays, short fiction and novels was probably best known for his 1996 masterwork, Infinite Jest . I, like many of the other readers to tackle Wallace's 1,079 page novel between June 21st and September 22nd. At roughly 75 pages a week and with participation estimated at more than 2,000 readers, the idea of taking on the massive work is far less intimidating. Since I'm a huge cheater, I started the week before but did stop twice to read Infinite Summer participants had read much of his shorter work and had purchased Infinite Jest with all good intentions to read it. Many of those reading it now had started it once or twice before, but had never finished. I suspect most readers were like me and after flipping through the densely written, heavily end-noted monster decided that a book like this would need time specially set aside for it.

Social networking has really enhanced the "we're all in this together" feeling of this summer read with over 2,500 people following Infinite Summer on Twitter and over 4,000 members on the Infinite Summer Facebook group.

As of this evening, I'm on page 395 and after admittedly battling through the somewhat disorienting, yet captivating first two hundred pages, I am on board and strapped in for the ride. I've never read anything quite like this and sadly, neither I nor anyone else ever will again. Certainly, Wallace's tragic suicide after a lifetime battling clinical depression has given this project a bittersweet edge.

I have a whole list of books I've read since the last time I posted and I want to hear about what you've all been reading. How are you? I've missed you guys.

What I Look for in a Book

Choosing which books to read, of the thousands if not millions of choices is an overwhelming decision. For each book I read, there are thousands that don’t make the cut. Time is precious. Until this year, I read lots of great books, but I didn’t have a plan or a method to guide my choices.

I decided to get more intentional with my selections and that begged the question, what am I looking for in a book? I ran across this post from 2006 at litblogger Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. Scott’s focus is on modern and postmodern fiction and he reads quite a bit of work in translation (and in Spanish, for that matter). I’ve included two litblogger’s lists in their entirety (although each of the original posts has more content) because I think their criteria is interesting. Scott has some specific criteria to identify what he likes and he’s listed them in order of importance.

Ongoing Dialectics. I like to feel that the book I'm reading is a debate, not a lecture. I like to feel that I can't judge what the author's intent is until the last page, and sometimes not even then. If I think the book is becoming too obvious in what it's trying to tell me, then it becomes just a dull demonstration. I get bored. I probably won't finish it. The ideas that animate a book should be like a tightrope walker, now teetering a bit one way, now teetering a bit the other way, always forging forward on an invisible thread. Note that this debate can take many forms--debates over philosophical ideas are the most obvious, but a book could also debate any of the following: different interpretations of a character, different value systems, different interpretations of events, different approaches to constructing a narrative or conducting a life, different styles. Note also--there's no rule that there can only be one dialectic per novel.

Challenging prose. Challenging prose is interesting prose. I love feeling that an author has abandoned me to a room full of hostile words. See, for instance, the beautifully complex sentences of James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, or William Gaddis. I like feeling like I'm constantly under pressure to interpret what the wuthor is telling me. I'm also interested in challenging prose on the level of a story: see, for instance, the narratives of Kazuo Ishiguro or Manuel Puig--I love how they continually make me feel like I'm just a step away from cresting a hill, after which I can look down upon the story and finally see how it works. (Note also: this moment is inevitable, but it is also inevitably a letdown; I like it when authors delayed it as long as possible.)

Stylistic creativity/skill. I almost put these into two separate categories, but then decided I couldn't separate one from the other. Some authors tinker with form, some perfect forms that have already been invented, but either way I think it requires a good deal of creativity and skill. Regardless of whether they're tinkerers or perfecters, however, I think authors should be showing me something I haven't seen before. Imperfections in style, while unavoidable, should be rare and forgivable. Also under style comes voice, which should be strong, original, and suit the aims of the novel. However, if I feel like a book has nothing to say, or that the prose isn't interesting, then very rarely will I keep reading, despite how much stylistic creativity or skill is present.

Depth of metaphors. I love metaphors with multiple meanings, and I love it when authors can orchestrate their books so that these metaphors interact in interesting ways. I would reference the works of Haruki Murakami here, most notably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I especially love book-spanning central metaphors that become a pivot point. A caveat: this is not an invitation for limitless complexity. Obviously there's a limit to how much meaning can be loaded into a metaphor before it becomes contrived, not to mention confusing.

The book makes an attempt to embody the workings of some organism. While not a deal-breaker, this is something I look for and am interesting in. Call it a pet interest of mine. Most often, the organism observed is the human mind, but I chose the word "organism" because I didn't want to limit things a book can embody to only the human mind. For instance, Don DeLillo's narratives don't embody the workings of the human mind so much as the systems that societies are organized upon (see also Orwell, David Mitchell, Pynchon). There have also been authors who have attempted to build alien consciousnesses.

Fidelity. Authors are free to tell their stories in whatever world they choose (our own simply being the one most commonly chosen). But once they have decided on their world and the rules that govern it, authors should never break those rules for frivolous reasons. Deus ex machinas suck (unless they're being explicitly used to point out something interesting about how they suck).

Characterization. Although I recognize that authors can use flat characters to good effect, I'm far more interested in well-characterized characters. Simply put, I think people are interesting and I like learning about them. I like seeing the creative ways an author can draw a character and how well the subtle nuances are brought out.

Economy. I don't have terribly strong feelings about sparse prose vs luxurious with prose, but if I have to choose one, I'll easily choose too sparse. Did I mention I love minimalists?

Humor. I think many good authors are playful authors, but I don't think being playful is the same thing as being humorous. Many authors are playful, but few are humorous. I like it when they are. See, for instance, DFW, who makes me laugh out loud.

Big Books. This is somewhat whimsical, so I'm putting it pretty far down the list, but I do have a soft spot for big books. I'll forgive more in an epic simply because I often admire its scale.

Edward Champion at Reluctant Habits followed Scott’s example and came up with this list:

A sense of playfulness. I will confess that a novel with a playful prose style is likely to tickle my fancy more than a straightforward tale written in that humorless realist mode that James Wood is so smitten with. This is not to suggest that I am adverse to realism or serious fiction. Richard Yates remains a firm favorite and I’ll go into the whys of this a tad later. The playfulness, however, should adhere to some reasonable human construct. It should be justified, motivated not by an author flexing his chops (see Dave Eggers and, to some degree, Saul Bellow, early Martin Amis, and Benjamin Kunkel), but because the nature of the fiction requires it. But here’s the strange loophole: If an author presents a unique and distinct way of seeing the world (such as Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers or David Foster Wallace), I’m more willing to forgive him his narrative digressions.

A concern for details. I have a soft spot for books that dare to present the world’s quotidian details in ways we haven’t seen before. Nicholson Baker comes to mind. Carol Shields too. Colson Whitehead, definitely. I suspect this is why I also like Updike so much and am willing to forgive Terrorist (and even the dreadful Gertrude and Claudius) for its flaws. When Updike writes about old buildings being split up like a cardboard box, there is something in his phrasing and imagery that makes me quite giddy. I feel as if I am seeing the world in ways that I haven’t observed it before. Sometimes, it could be through a miniscule detail in the phrasing. Sometimes, it’s just outright daffy foci. When Baker describes a paperclip and dares to chart precisely how it was manufactured, I feel indebted to him for overlooking some pivotal aspect of the world that I should be paying attention to.

Keeping it real. I’m not a big fan of magical realism. My bullshit detector flies off the charts when people inexplicably begin flying in the middle of a novel because the author can’t determine a way to progress his narrative forward. There are certainly exceptions (Murakami, Calvino, Borges) with authors who dabble in the surreal, but, for the most part, such exercises escape a writer’s first and foremost duty: to convey the human experience in a way in which we can believe it. I can believe, for example, the extraordinary world of China Mieville’s New Crobuzon because there is an underlying structure to its gaslights, its curious criminal justice system with the Remades, and its underground scientists toiling away at experiments in dingy apartments. Likewise, I can look at a book like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and ferret out the precise details which reveal the Wheelers’ discontentment. The environs or the genre or the highbrow/lowbrow status matters little to me. It’s the verisimiltude that keeps my motor purring.

A fresh perspective. For the next LBC round, I nominated a book that had one of the most unique perspectives I had encountered in some time. It was not simply the book’s unusual and quite idiosynchratic perspective that rocked my world, but, tied into my last point, the realization that this author had weaved a tale of unexpected poignancy that felt as real as any other tale. This harkens back to my earlier point of recontextualization. I think Scott and I differ a bit on this point. We once got into a heated conversation about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, in which he felt that what Mitchell was portraying was typical and I defended the book’s ability to recontextualize both narrative and the world around us, while agreeing that its platitude-stacked ending was a bit of a letdown.

A sense of ambition. One of literature’s great challenges is to push the envelope further in a way that we haven’t seen it before. I can forgive a flawed book like Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, which I wrote about here, because it’s attempting an earnestness that is well at odds with the irony-soaked novels and literary realism so fashionable today. Likewise, if Robert Coover sometimes leaves me cold or a John Barth volume flounders, the ambition still sticks to the craw.

Giddy experimentalism. To me, Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson are extraordinary writers because they experiment in a manner which invites. Sorrentino’s elaborate lies (such as the giddy notion of a character playing “roles” in various novels offered in Mulligan Stew) and Markson’s sentence-by-sentence approach to narrative remind us that experimentalism doesn’t have to be a cold and off-putting affair. Theirs is the purest and most difficult form of experimentalism to pull off.

Difficulty. I like books that challenge me. Books that I have to deconstruct, books in which I constantly have to look up things, books that compel me to reread them later, books I savor. I like books in which I don’t really have a sense of what’s going on until Page 75. I like books, like Ander Monson’s Other Electricities, that, with its index, suggest an interconnectedness that a grad student might spend weeks dwelling upon. I like Gaddis’s approach to dialogue in J.R., where we have to work to figure out who is speaking (which implies that we really aren’t paying nearly as much attention as we should).

Balls. I like writers who make me feel uncomfortable. I like writers who tell the truth. I like writers who want to take me to places I would never visit in a million years. I like writers who throw me into a horrific place and refuse to take the easy way out.

My goals as a reader aren't nearly as sophisticated. These are two litbloggers, among a number of them that I find interesting and I learn a lot from them. They eat and breathe literature and a great deal of the time I frankly don’t understand what they’re talking about. But I love what they’ve done with these lists. Creating a list like this really helps to focus on the books most likely to meet my own criteria, but more importantly, it helps me to think about why I’m reading in the first place.

For now, this is my list:

Originality. An artful novel needs to tell a story in a way that’s never been done before or present a unique perspective. The artfulness and originality may be in the story itself, the themes, the characters, the structure or the prose, but there has to be something that is unique to each author’s style.

Challenging Prose. I’m an active reader. I like it when an author makes me stretch. Proust has stretched me a fair distance. I’ve had to look up unfamiliar words and terms and refer to endnotes to understand cultural, geographical and historical references in order to understand and enjoy the work. Saul Bellow’s work is similarly challenging at times, but I love the payoff.

Ambition/Risk Taking. This makes me think of a novel I read last year that was incredibly ambitious, highly original, had deeply drawn characters and somehow just missed the mark. I would rather read a novel where the author has gone out on a limb, even if it doesn’t quite work than a formulaic story that works, but where the author didn’t take any chances or try anything new.

Characters With Depth. A book needs multi-dimensional characters to work.

Artfulness. Fine writing leaves me with a sense of wonder and the sensation that the author has superhuman powers. The perfect metaphor, description that is unusual, but never jarring, appropriate use of rhythm and the ability to write sentence that goes on for hundreds of words without exhausting the reader are all characteristics of artful writing. I love an author who gives me sentences or paragraphs that are so beautiful that I have to stop and read them again and maybe even break out a highlighter so I return to them and savor them again.

I’ve always been drawn to modernist literature and it seemed logical to me that I should start the year out by starting Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. The modernist literary movement peaked in Europe in the early 1900s and According to Wikipedia modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger is considered to be the first modernist novel), Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, and others.

Reading In Search of Lost Time has been a great reading experience. I finished the third volume last night and will take a Proust break for several books before I start the fourth. It has made me realize how satisfying it is to me to not only read, but to study literature. The beauty of reading titles that are so canonical is that there is no shortage of information and opinion about them, so I've been spending quite a bit of time reading blogs that focus on literature and literary criticism.

Some of the blogs and websites I've been reading lately are: The Reading Experience, Chekhov's Mistress, Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes, A Commonplace Blog, Maud Newton, The Elegant Variation, The Millions, Wyatt Mason and The Believer.

Where does all this heavy reading and studying leave my writing? Where, indeed.

I haven't touched my draft novel, The Foundling Wheel in months, but I have been trying my hand at some short fiction. I have always puzzled at the idea that some writers find that they are influenced by the writers they read. Never once did that happen to me, until recently. I don't know that stylistically Proust has had much of an influence, but the views into character and his detailed observations have profoundly affected the way I think about telling a story. For the double whammy, I find myself trying to emulate Saul Bellow.

There's no way to predict what path I'll take with writing now. Maybe I'll trash everything I've ever done and start over and maybe I'll decide that studying and absorbing the great works already in print is enough.

How about you? Do you plan out your reading list, and what do you look for in a book?