I have just finished reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. This strange book is a product of its time and place (1966, California). It was an age of paranoia induced by social issues, assassinations (Kennedy, Kennedy and King), a new war (Viet Nam), marijuana highs, and fear of getting caught being high. LSD was legal and being tested as a therapy for multiple issues including alcoholism. Pynchon rides this wave of paranoia with a book about a possible conspiracy - or more accurately, an anti-conspiracy. As such, in another's hands it might be a deep dark tale. It's not. Think instead of James Bond meets meets Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) meets The Watchman. Lots of sex and booze in a mystery to be unraveled. This could have been a graphic novel.
The experience of reading the book mirrors the experience of dancing to the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in 1966. The pulsing psychedelic strobe lights illuminate something new each second. Each previous illumination disappears and is quickly forgotten. Oedipa, the book's "heroine" moves from impulse to impulse, rushing into an unknown future ripe with possibilities. And just as with a strobe-lit scene, we don't see much beyond the surface until the music stops and we adjust our eyes to see what is actually there. But we must hurry, because the music will start again soon.One must adjust one's brain to make sense of what is going on in this book, and to focus deeply on the undercurrents.
The story line is deceptively simple: Oedipa Maas, a housewife living in San Francisco with her DJ husband, receives word that her ex-lover, a real-estate tycoon named Pierce Inverarity, has died and left the job of co-executor of his estate to her. Without giving it a second thought, she takes leave of her husband and drives south to "San Narciso" near L.A, where she finds a sleezy motel room to stay in while she works on inventorying the estate. In a funny scene, Inverarity's very handsome lawyer finds her at the motel, gets her drunk and plays strip poker with her. She puts on multiple layers of clothes to confound him, but after he has fallen asleep, seduces him anyway. In this fashion, she encounters and plays a part in countless bizarre situations. She accepts the situations at face value until details in events begin to form strange patterns. Clues are everywhere for something big that is hidden. The hidden thing is illuminated and then Oedipa struggles with paranoia, sanity and clarity. As the tale comes to a close, Pynchon suggests that it is America at stake here.
Spoiler Alert: What is hidden is a tale of mistrust of government mail system that reaches back to the 1500s when the company, Thurn & Taxis, had a monopoly on delivering mail in the Holy Roman Empire (parts of Europe and England). As Pynchon's invented tale goes, some people (including William of Orange) mistrusted this service and so a group of rebels headed by a man named Trystero plot to take over the mail. The rebels waylay the mail carriers, kill them, take the mail, and claim the routes, thus preventing the powers-that-be from controlling it. So now move to the 1600s in the USA where immigrant-descendants of Trystero have arrived and brought their underground mail service with them. Somehow the mail service finds its way to California and is embraced by every underground group there: right-wingers, gays, jazz musicians, poets, you-name-it. This is an anti-conspiracy: a mistrust of the government's mail service and of the control over communication. Thinking back to the 1960s and the new underground movement it all fits together and Pynchon is a historian of the day.
"Paranoia strikes deep
Into your heart it will leap
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away ..."
--- Buffalo Springfield
But in fact, Trystero may be an invention and Oedipa is challenged to sort through the facts to find the truth. As she finds evidence of Trystero everywhere she looks, she must decide if it is real, a series of incredible coincidences, a fake (a grand ploy paid for by Inverarity and acted out for her eyes only) or a hallucination. She is not strong enough to do this. The events confound her and she is unable to follow leads to their ends for fear that she will lose her sanity, her friends and perhaps her own life (although she never confesses to this). In the end, she sits and waits for the answer to be given to her, but the reader sees that this wait is futile.
In the pages that end the book, Pynchon tries to make his point about why an underground mail system is inevitable in America. He speaks of an America that is unable to serve those who do not fit in a certain mold. These people - the left-overs of a sort - feel alienated from the country and paranoid about what will happen to them if their true selves are exposed. For their own safety, they opt out of America in the most significant way that they can by going underground with an alternate mail service. As we look back at this bit of history, we can see how well this book illuminates its era: "Turn on, tune in, drop out". End of Spoiler.
Pynchon was not proud of this book and purportedly called it a "potboiler". Most reviewers recognize it as a great book. It has many of the same themes and is much more accessible then his other tomes. However, it is not a perfect book. In the last few pages, he shifts into a deep think peace on the people who have been left out of America. The essay is dense and hard to follow and in my opinion, does not weave the two stories, Oepedia and Trystero, together smoothly enough for the reader to get the big picture. Oedipa's story is not strong enough to balance the weight of the Trystero tale. The reader has to work hard to fill in the pieces. Having finally "got it", I found it worth the effort.
Pynchon is a very private person and has himself lived "underground" so-to-speak for 30+ years. Whatever must he think about the internet? How interesting it would be if Pynchon were to move his cast of characters and story to the 9/11 era.
Some interesting sites:
Andrew Gordon, now a professor at U Florida, spent an evening with Pynchon in San Fransisco in 1967. Here is his interesting tale.
Also, read the NYT review from 1966.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
The Blind Assasin Review
Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a multi-level story. An 83 year old woman, Iris Chase Griffin creates a diary of her days as the wrapper for sections of a bigger tale -- her autobiography. Intermixed with this narrative is a second book called The Blind Assassin which is also multi-layered. The wrapper for this second book is the story of two unnamed lovers, a man on the run and a wealthy woman, who meet in secret on stolen afternoons. The inner story is the science fiction tale that the lovers compose together while idly lying in bed after making love. To these narratives, Atwood adds newspaper clippings that describe social events of the day.
I first read The Blind Assassin 2 years ago. After 70 pages, I was ready to quit it, but the friend who had loaned it to me was so insistent on its quality, that I skimmed much of the rest of the book before returning it to her. I did not like it. But I knew I had not done it justice, and so when it came time to read it as part of the Times 100 list, I decided to read every word. And I did. It is a long book at 520 pages, and longer still because of the long paragraphs filled with lush prose. No matter how beautiful the prose, it rambles. An editor should have trimmed it.
I was glad for the second reading. Each of the tales go through surprise twists and turns and so it begs for a second reading just to make sense of all that has happened.
Iris starts her narrative discussing the death (possible suicide) of her sister Laura who was 25 at the time. She then moves back in time and gives a history of her family and her marriage to Richard Griffin.
There is an intricate structure to the book. In the first 14 pages, we read two news clippings. The first reports Laura's death. The second is Richard's obituary two years later. (The remainder of the book provides the story of how and why these two events occurred.) In that same space of 14 pages, we have also been introduced to all of the tales. The two books: the autobiography and The Blind Assassin, are intertwined and actually meet in time and place about three-fourths of the way through. There are many parallels between the stories. And there is a buried structural symmetry in the telling of Laura's book.
Did I like the book? Out of the 20 on the Time 100 list I've read this past 6 months, it is #3 on my list; I like to chew on books and this is a chewy book. I liked the story of the lovers and their created story. The autobiography of Iris felt like Dickens with pretty prose - but it's not my cup of tea. My biggest disappointment was in not liking Iris - which is why I didn't want to read it the first time around.
So what did I chew on? (Spoilers in here!) Why does Laura not tell Iris about what is happening to her? Is Laura insane? Why doesn't Alex leave Toronto? Why doesn't he try to make a new life in another place? Iris makes a new life for herself, but she never remarries. Is that predictable? There are any number of parallels in the tales. What is the purpose of the science fiction story? Why is the book called The Blind Assassins?
I first read The Blind Assassin 2 years ago. After 70 pages, I was ready to quit it, but the friend who had loaned it to me was so insistent on its quality, that I skimmed much of the rest of the book before returning it to her. I did not like it. But I knew I had not done it justice, and so when it came time to read it as part of the Times 100 list, I decided to read every word. And I did. It is a long book at 520 pages, and longer still because of the long paragraphs filled with lush prose. No matter how beautiful the prose, it rambles. An editor should have trimmed it.
I was glad for the second reading. Each of the tales go through surprise twists and turns and so it begs for a second reading just to make sense of all that has happened.
Iris starts her narrative discussing the death (possible suicide) of her sister Laura who was 25 at the time. She then moves back in time and gives a history of her family and her marriage to Richard Griffin.
There is an intricate structure to the book. In the first 14 pages, we read two news clippings. The first reports Laura's death. The second is Richard's obituary two years later. (The remainder of the book provides the story of how and why these two events occurred.) In that same space of 14 pages, we have also been introduced to all of the tales. The two books: the autobiography and The Blind Assassin, are intertwined and actually meet in time and place about three-fourths of the way through. There are many parallels between the stories. And there is a buried structural symmetry in the telling of Laura's book.
Did I like the book? Out of the 20 on the Time 100 list I've read this past 6 months, it is #3 on my list; I like to chew on books and this is a chewy book. I liked the story of the lovers and their created story. The autobiography of Iris felt like Dickens with pretty prose - but it's not my cup of tea. My biggest disappointment was in not liking Iris - which is why I didn't want to read it the first time around.
So what did I chew on? (Spoilers in here!) Why does Laura not tell Iris about what is happening to her? Is Laura insane? Why doesn't Alex leave Toronto? Why doesn't he try to make a new life in another place? Iris makes a new life for herself, but she never remarries. Is that predictable? There are any number of parallels in the tales. What is the purpose of the science fiction story? Why is the book called The Blind Assassins?
Friday, August 19, 2011
Finding Memories & The Blind Assassin
In OT school, I learned that as we move into our 60s, we begin to look back at our past. We see if we have lived the life we dreamed of. We mull over our successes and failures. As we do this, we come to terms with our life.
So here I am at the age of 61, seeing memories of past days spontaneously flash in my mind. When I see the child down the street in a red wagon, I suddenly see myself in one at the age of 5. This comes unbidden. I should write them all down. Thus far I haven't.
But that is precisely what 83 year-old Iris in The Blind Assassin does. She is writing her autobiography before she dies. The details are lush. Her past is so clear, one could use her prose to paint pictures of days at picnics or film a movie of children exploring a house. I will save her story for another post ... but quite honestly, it gives me hope for writing or art in my retirement years.
So here I am at the age of 61, seeing memories of past days spontaneously flash in my mind. When I see the child down the street in a red wagon, I suddenly see myself in one at the age of 5. This comes unbidden. I should write them all down. Thus far I haven't.
But that is precisely what 83 year-old Iris in The Blind Assassin does. She is writing her autobiography before she dies. The details are lush. Her past is so clear, one could use her prose to paint pictures of days at picnics or film a movie of children exploring a house. I will save her story for another post ... but quite honestly, it gives me hope for writing or art in my retirement years.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Painted Bird
How does one come to terms with a book that depicts all of the evil of mankind through the eyes of a child?
In The Painted Bird a Jewish boy is sent out of harm's way to a foster home prior to Nazis invading his Eastern European country. His new foster mother dies and thereafter he lives by his wits and the occasional kindness of others. As he roams from village to village he experiences cruel mistreatment and witnesses others being cruelly treated. The amount of violence, cruelty, sexual depravity and misconduct is unbelievable ... and in fact, the tale is not to be literally believed as an autobiography would be. It is the bringing together of tales and metaphors to make sense of what happened to Jews and Gypsies in WWII.
The tale covers five years. Each chapter brings a new perversity. Some of the situations seem more native to the concentration camps than to a villages, and I wonder if he took the tales he heard and simply worked them to fit his book which never enters a camp. A small gripe - sexual scenes are sometimes over the top - and indeed author, Kosinski claimed to have had an obsession with sex.
Seeing all of this through the eyes of a child is quite powerful (just as it was in Room). The reader comes away with a certain understanding of how evil is perpetuated as well as how easy it is to indoctrinate a youth into a philosophy or way of life like communism (or Nazism) - and how hard it is to take that from him later.
The Painted Bird was written by Jerzy Kosinski although the authorship is controversial. It may have been written in Polish and then translated and polished extensively by an American editor. This piece of information makes one stop and think a little, but in the end it doesn't matter -- The Painted Bird is a great book.
In The Painted Bird a Jewish boy is sent out of harm's way to a foster home prior to Nazis invading his Eastern European country. His new foster mother dies and thereafter he lives by his wits and the occasional kindness of others. As he roams from village to village he experiences cruel mistreatment and witnesses others being cruelly treated. The amount of violence, cruelty, sexual depravity and misconduct is unbelievable ... and in fact, the tale is not to be literally believed as an autobiography would be. It is the bringing together of tales and metaphors to make sense of what happened to Jews and Gypsies in WWII.
The tale covers five years. Each chapter brings a new perversity. Some of the situations seem more native to the concentration camps than to a villages, and I wonder if he took the tales he heard and simply worked them to fit his book which never enters a camp. A small gripe - sexual scenes are sometimes over the top - and indeed author, Kosinski claimed to have had an obsession with sex.
Seeing all of this through the eyes of a child is quite powerful (just as it was in Room). The reader comes away with a certain understanding of how evil is perpetuated as well as how easy it is to indoctrinate a youth into a philosophy or way of life like communism (or Nazism) - and how hard it is to take that from him later.
The Painted Bird was written by Jerzy Kosinski although the authorship is controversial. It may have been written in Polish and then translated and polished extensively by an American editor. This piece of information makes one stop and think a little, but in the end it doesn't matter -- The Painted Bird is a great book.
Positively Great Books
What makes for a truly great book? It's the elements that resonate with us, the elements that stretch us, beautiful writing, a compelling story, the dysfunctional characters, the negativity .... Wait a minute, wait a minute.
As I read through the Time 100 list, I find book after book with highly neurotic characters. Think of Scarlett O'Hara, the narrator in Lolita, and John Self in Money. Now we are all neurotic to some degree, but so many authors on the list use negativity as a key element to attract their audience.
I don't like it and I don't get it. But that's just me ... and it's many of my friends. We still enjoy a great story. We just don't want to be dragged into the inner circuits of a dysfunctional person. Let their psychotherapist do that. I want to read books that have positive elements and characters with some amount of hope. I think of Frank Alpine in Malamud's The Assistant. He's a loser, but he has hope and he redeems himself. Now think of Lolita. The Narrator is a real loser, and has no hope. None whatsoever. Why did I read this? Just to get into the inner workings of a pedophile. Oh.
Anyway, I will continue to read the books on the Time 100 list. But I though I'd compile a list of books that do not rotate around negative people. Which is not to say that the characters do not live in a difficult world. I include The Painted Bird and Ender's Game, for example. Check out the list. It will grow and change with time.
If you'd like to share a list of great books with redeeming characteristics, pass it along!
As I read through the Time 100 list, I find book after book with highly neurotic characters. Think of Scarlett O'Hara, the narrator in Lolita, and John Self in Money. Now we are all neurotic to some degree, but so many authors on the list use negativity as a key element to attract their audience.
I don't like it and I don't get it. But that's just me ... and it's many of my friends. We still enjoy a great story. We just don't want to be dragged into the inner circuits of a dysfunctional person. Let their psychotherapist do that. I want to read books that have positive elements and characters with some amount of hope. I think of Frank Alpine in Malamud's The Assistant. He's a loser, but he has hope and he redeems himself. Now think of Lolita. The Narrator is a real loser, and has no hope. None whatsoever. Why did I read this? Just to get into the inner workings of a pedophile. Oh.
Anyway, I will continue to read the books on the Time 100 list. But I though I'd compile a list of books that do not rotate around negative people. Which is not to say that the characters do not live in a difficult world. I include The Painted Bird and Ender's Game, for example. Check out the list. It will grow and change with time.
If you'd like to share a list of great books with redeeming characteristics, pass it along!
Monday, August 15, 2011
Helping Border's Books Close
Today I made my 4th pilgrimage to Border's Books since they announced that all the stores were closing. This is a bittersweet affair for me. I get a bit emotional every time I go into one of the stores. I grew up with the original Border's in Ann Arbor - back when it was in a small store and sold used and new books. I've watched them grow and change hands several times. I also watched them put some of the other small book stores out of business. I thought I had stopped caring about the corporation Borders. But in fact, I do care.
For my first visit to the sales, I went to the Ann Arbor store just to get through the sadness. Since then I've been visiting my local store.Today was a big, new sale so I arrived there early and shopped for books on the Time 100 list. It took me 2-3 hours. I am trying to find the thicker books as well as titles I can't get from my local library. At this point, the shelves at Borders' have lost their order and it's not necessarily easy to find the books you want. But I was lucky and came away with 2 bags filled and overflowing.
I'm guessing that the stores will be closed in the next week or so. I've been holding off on the final good-bye to the Ann Arbor store, but I am still missing a few of the Time 100 books, so I it may be time to make the trip. Bittersweet, indeed.
For my first visit to the sales, I went to the Ann Arbor store just to get through the sadness. Since then I've been visiting my local store.Today was a big, new sale so I arrived there early and shopped for books on the Time 100 list. It took me 2-3 hours. I am trying to find the thicker books as well as titles I can't get from my local library. At this point, the shelves at Borders' have lost their order and it's not necessarily easy to find the books you want. But I was lucky and came away with 2 bags filled and overflowing.
I'm guessing that the stores will be closed in the next week or so. I've been holding off on the final good-bye to the Ann Arbor store, but I am still missing a few of the Time 100 books, so I it may be time to make the trip. Bittersweet, indeed.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Wild Saragosso Sea
Just finished Wild Saragossa Sea, Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, written about 120 years after Jane Eyre. It is the story of the the early life and marriage of Antoinette Bertha Mason. Antoinette - known as Bertha in Jane Eyre - is the mad woman living in the attic at Thornbury. The book has 3 parts. The first, her childhood, takes place in Jamaica. The second part relates Antoinette and Rochester's honeymoon in her mother's edenic, but run-down estate in Martinique. The last part describes Antoinette's (now called Bertha) life in England.
Spoiler Alert --
The story of Antoinette is dreamlike with elements of a nightmare that allude to her family's madness. There are two types of death, she says. The first is death to the world, the second is death of the body. She is aware that she may follow her mother and namesake into madness. And as we know, this does happen. What is not clear is if the madness is preventable. Antoinette is fragile. Madness is in her genes, but it appears that the traumatic events of her life are the actual causal agents. Her youth is spent in poverty. Her family is now poor, hated by the Creoles and bullied by them. She finds respite from this hatred in a Catholic boarding school in her teens after her mother marries a wealthy man. At 17, Antoinette is given (unwillingly) to Rochester as bride in a prearranged marriage. Surprisingly, during their honeymoon in Martinique he wins her over and she is happy for the first time in her life.
Rochester is brusk but not unkind. He is a product of Imperialistic England, bred to be a leader as opposed to a culturally aware individual. He comes to Jamaica to take a bride and her wealth. He understands that he must care for her and use her riches to her good. He wants to do this and to win her love in the process. That he is unable to follow this plan compassionately is due to his naivete and to the hostile environment they live in. Rhys peoples her book in Jamaica and Martinique with poor Creoles who are as fiery as the heat. They are only just-freed from slavery and hate the English. The honeymoon is set far from urban areas in a dilapidated house with Creole staff and neighbors who taunt the couple and offer Rochester mean advice. When trouble arises, there is no one that Rochester can trust, and so he falls back on lessons gained from his English upbringing to give him insight. It is an imperfect method in this Creole world.
On their honeymoon, Antoinette comes alive to him as a vibrant, sexual being that he is both attracted to and afraid of. Local people insist on telling him of her mad mother, drunken father as well as about the sexual affair she had with her cousin. This destroys the bit of love that had been building in Rochester. He rejects her and sleeps in his dressing room. He cannot get past the ideal of the prudish English women that he was raised with and he cannot see her in her own context. He begins to interpret her gayness and lust for him as madness and will not listen when she or her former nurse try to provide perspective. As he takes his own counsel, he puts in place events that will have tragic outcomes for both of them.
Having failed to communicate with Rochester, Antoinette moves into silence. We hear words from her again only when she is in her attic room in England.
In what could have been a potentially good ending for this story, Antoinette's nurse begs Rochester to take half of the money and head to England, leaving Antoinette behind with the other half of the fortune. He never comprehends this alternative as viable - and in his time and world, it may not have been for he would have been disgraced in the eyes of his father and brother. But as it turns out, his father and brother are both dead upon his return to England. The Ending of Jane Eyre is fixed. Rhys cannot change it. And so we are left to mourn the irony of these events and the pieces of their lives.
Spoiler Alert --
The story of Antoinette is dreamlike with elements of a nightmare that allude to her family's madness. There are two types of death, she says. The first is death to the world, the second is death of the body. She is aware that she may follow her mother and namesake into madness. And as we know, this does happen. What is not clear is if the madness is preventable. Antoinette is fragile. Madness is in her genes, but it appears that the traumatic events of her life are the actual causal agents. Her youth is spent in poverty. Her family is now poor, hated by the Creoles and bullied by them. She finds respite from this hatred in a Catholic boarding school in her teens after her mother marries a wealthy man. At 17, Antoinette is given (unwillingly) to Rochester as bride in a prearranged marriage. Surprisingly, during their honeymoon in Martinique he wins her over and she is happy for the first time in her life.
Rochester is brusk but not unkind. He is a product of Imperialistic England, bred to be a leader as opposed to a culturally aware individual. He comes to Jamaica to take a bride and her wealth. He understands that he must care for her and use her riches to her good. He wants to do this and to win her love in the process. That he is unable to follow this plan compassionately is due to his naivete and to the hostile environment they live in. Rhys peoples her book in Jamaica and Martinique with poor Creoles who are as fiery as the heat. They are only just-freed from slavery and hate the English. The honeymoon is set far from urban areas in a dilapidated house with Creole staff and neighbors who taunt the couple and offer Rochester mean advice. When trouble arises, there is no one that Rochester can trust, and so he falls back on lessons gained from his English upbringing to give him insight. It is an imperfect method in this Creole world.
On their honeymoon, Antoinette comes alive to him as a vibrant, sexual being that he is both attracted to and afraid of. Local people insist on telling him of her mad mother, drunken father as well as about the sexual affair she had with her cousin. This destroys the bit of love that had been building in Rochester. He rejects her and sleeps in his dressing room. He cannot get past the ideal of the prudish English women that he was raised with and he cannot see her in her own context. He begins to interpret her gayness and lust for him as madness and will not listen when she or her former nurse try to provide perspective. As he takes his own counsel, he puts in place events that will have tragic outcomes for both of them.
Having failed to communicate with Rochester, Antoinette moves into silence. We hear words from her again only when she is in her attic room in England.
In what could have been a potentially good ending for this story, Antoinette's nurse begs Rochester to take half of the money and head to England, leaving Antoinette behind with the other half of the fortune. He never comprehends this alternative as viable - and in his time and world, it may not have been for he would have been disgraced in the eyes of his father and brother. But as it turns out, his father and brother are both dead upon his return to England. The Ending of Jane Eyre is fixed. Rhys cannot change it. And so we are left to mourn the irony of these events and the pieces of their lives.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Time 100 Books Plus Others to Help Me Cope With Them
I am one of a number of people reading books off the Time 100 list. There are great books on that list such as Catch 22, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Infinite Jest and The Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately, there are also a number of slimy books, horribly depressing books, decadent books, boring books and ultra-violent books. (Please forgive me if these books are your favorites ...) For these, I have developed strategies to slog through them.
For Lolita, I read about 100 pages until the pedophilia blossomed. Then I started from the back of the book and read sections until it hit the nasty stuff again. Done. Check that one off the list.
For Martin Amis's, Money, (incredibly decadent and "brutally funny"- yuck) I read 120 pages, skipped 160 pages (I only missed one plot development) then read the last 100 or so. Check.
It was impossible to skip text in The Neuromancer (violent and not my style, though I like sci-fi), but I was able to skim read it successfully. His prose is nothing to brag about - it's the concepts that put this book on the list, so I didn't feel I lost anything. It also helped that I read the book at the same time that Robert, the blogger of 101 Books, did. Misery loves company - he didn't care much for it either.
I have dipped into William Burroughs' Naked Lunch any number of times since my youth without success - so I have no idea if I'm going to be successful with finishing this book. However, I have read an entire Burroughs book (and felt slimy for days afterwards). So maybe I'll cheat and check this one off.
I have not the heart to open the cover of Revolutionary Road which many claim is the most depressing book (and movie) ever written. (Is that how it made the list?) That in itself is depressing since I already had to put down The Corrections for the same reason. All my strategies for The Corrections failed. I tried reading 50 pages then reading another book (Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, worked well.) Then I read another 50 pages followed by yet another book. This was going well, but at some point I was only able to get through 5 pages of The Corrections before I needed another antidote. I gave up and put it aside. I'll trick myself into picking it up later. I'm really betting that I'll love it if ONLY I can get through the background stories of this dysfunctional family.
I had to put aside Gone With the Wind, too. I made it pretty easily through the first half - the Civil War, but the idea of Scarlett O'Hara and Ashley going through reconstruction was just more than I could stand. I'll pick it up later.
You might suggest that I just throw in the towel. But in fact, I am really enjoying reading books from the list. There are lots of surprises - even in books I've slogged through. For example, after really struggling through 120 pages of Malumud's The Assistant, which is a very sad book, I fell in love with it. And I truly slogged through the 1000+ page Infinite Jest, but it's in my top-5 favorites.
And this leads me to my latest and favorite strategy: using Book Drum. I am currently reading Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea. It is the story of Rochester's mad wife, Bertha ( in Jane Eyre). It's an unusual book and one that I might have read too quickly. I didn't want to do that - I wanted to appreciate why it was on the list. So I started looking up the geography of the area (The Carribean) and before long, I ran into the Bookmarks on Book Drum for this book. The Bookmarks pages are essentially footnotes. I found that they give me more material to absorb and appreciate ...and I am loving the book because of this.
And I now understand that it was the footnotes in Infinite Jest that made it truly work. The good thing about footnotes is that they give a reader pause, they keep me from falling too deeply into a difficult story. Who knows,by using the footnotes I may even be able to get through Revolutionary Road!
For Lolita, I read about 100 pages until the pedophilia blossomed. Then I started from the back of the book and read sections until it hit the nasty stuff again. Done. Check that one off the list.
For Martin Amis's, Money, (incredibly decadent and "brutally funny"- yuck) I read 120 pages, skipped 160 pages (I only missed one plot development) then read the last 100 or so. Check.
It was impossible to skip text in The Neuromancer (violent and not my style, though I like sci-fi), but I was able to skim read it successfully. His prose is nothing to brag about - it's the concepts that put this book on the list, so I didn't feel I lost anything. It also helped that I read the book at the same time that Robert, the blogger of 101 Books, did. Misery loves company - he didn't care much for it either.
I have dipped into William Burroughs' Naked Lunch any number of times since my youth without success - so I have no idea if I'm going to be successful with finishing this book. However, I have read an entire Burroughs book (and felt slimy for days afterwards). So maybe I'll cheat and check this one off.
I have not the heart to open the cover of Revolutionary Road which many claim is the most depressing book (and movie) ever written. (Is that how it made the list?) That in itself is depressing since I already had to put down The Corrections for the same reason. All my strategies for The Corrections failed. I tried reading 50 pages then reading another book (Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, worked well.) Then I read another 50 pages followed by yet another book. This was going well, but at some point I was only able to get through 5 pages of The Corrections before I needed another antidote. I gave up and put it aside. I'll trick myself into picking it up later. I'm really betting that I'll love it if ONLY I can get through the background stories of this dysfunctional family.
I had to put aside Gone With the Wind, too. I made it pretty easily through the first half - the Civil War, but the idea of Scarlett O'Hara and Ashley going through reconstruction was just more than I could stand. I'll pick it up later.
You might suggest that I just throw in the towel. But in fact, I am really enjoying reading books from the list. There are lots of surprises - even in books I've slogged through. For example, after really struggling through 120 pages of Malumud's The Assistant, which is a very sad book, I fell in love with it. And I truly slogged through the 1000+ page Infinite Jest, but it's in my top-5 favorites.
And this leads me to my latest and favorite strategy: using Book Drum. I am currently reading Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea. It is the story of Rochester's mad wife, Bertha ( in Jane Eyre). It's an unusual book and one that I might have read too quickly. I didn't want to do that - I wanted to appreciate why it was on the list. So I started looking up the geography of the area (The Carribean) and before long, I ran into the Bookmarks on Book Drum for this book. The Bookmarks pages are essentially footnotes. I found that they give me more material to absorb and appreciate ...and I am loving the book because of this.
And I now understand that it was the footnotes in Infinite Jest that made it truly work. The good thing about footnotes is that they give a reader pause, they keep me from falling too deeply into a difficult story. Who knows,by using the footnotes I may even be able to get through Revolutionary Road!
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