I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[morgan]

Oh and also I am re-reading The Hunger Games and Catching Fire before reading Mockingjay, which just came in the mail a day or two ago and I am SO EXCITED you guys, for real.

[davy]

I love Steve Almond and I've thoroughly enjoyed almost everything he's written...but I kind of hate his new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He's at least 8 years too late for this party. The content is almost exactly as ho-hum as the title. Chuck Klosterman has written this book three or four times already--and those books were bad enough when I cared a little about the bands under discussion. I could care less about the musicians Steve Almond cares about: Chuck Prophet, Boris McCutcheon, Dayna Kurtz, Ike Reilly, Nil Lara...I mean, who the fuck are those people? I just finished reading a 3-page unironic defense of Styx and the entire time I was thinking, "Oh, Steve...didn't you read Fargo Rock City? Somebody beat you to it, man!"

I just feel embarrassed for the dude. I'm cringing almost once per page. I think his editor failed him big-time.

Oh no, this makes me really sad. I haven't gotten around to buying it yet, and I guess now I'll see if I can get it from the library first. I am in love with Steve Almond.

Don't be sad. It took him about 75 pages, but he's won me over. He's just too good a writer, even when the content is not particularly original. In the opening sections, he was really trying to drive home the point--THIS BOOK IS ABOUT BLAH, BECAUSE BLAH IS IMPORTANT--and that part was tedious and pretty embarrassing. But now he's settled into storytelling mode and the book has become what I wanted it to be, which is Steve Almond writing about music.

Plus, remember that I've already read two very similar books in as many months. Maybe you haven't read a book about music or pop culture in a while and it will seem fresher to you. It says something about the quality of the writing that even though I'm bored to tears with the format, I've changed my mind about the book itself. Reading it off and on over the past 24 hours has been quite enjoyable.

[morgan]

Yay! I'm pretty sure I would marry Steve Almond if I had the chance.

[davy]

Here, take this passage, for instance. I might have read some similar books recently, and they might've been good, but none of them rung quite so true:

The guy had a sick sense of rhythm, a melodic knack to rival McCartney, a voice of uncommon range and clarity. But he also wrote beautifully in two languages, three if you include the Afro-Cuban scat he did when the spirit took him. It made me suddenly furious again on Nil's behalf. "Doesn't it bug you, though," I said, "to know you never got what you deserved?"

There was another pause. I hoped I'd maybe knocked some of the poise out of Nil.

"That's okay," he said softly. "Be selfish. Keep it to yourself."

His voice was full of tenderness; I felt a lump in my throat. Was I going to weep? Was Nil Lara going to make me weep after all these years? "What does big mean anyway?" he said. "That I get to play in a mall? Or some giant arena where everything's lit up and you can't see anyone? I've played in those places, Steve. It's like you're in a vacuum. No, I like bars. You order a beer and there's a band and that's it. You can see the faces, the bodies dancing. What else could I want?"

Nil was saying, in essence: those nights of song at the Talkhouse--they were the dream. The rest was just the ambition we'd gathered on his behalf, which he was returning to me now, gently, without a hint of anger. I wanted to tell Nil that he was my hero, that he'd inspired me to become more than I thought I could. But I knew that would sound hokey, so I told him I should let him go and hung up and ran down to the basement and found his first record and blasted the thing and tried to remember the last time I'd felt so full of hope.

Good stuff.

[davy]

And this one!

It was the sort of fight you relish in the late stages of a long relationship, when you're both hunting for an excuse to hate each other's guts. She took me to this Dominican restaurant that made the best chicken on earth--it certainly smelled that way--and we got up to the counter and she ordered a whole chicken without even consulting me. Wait a second, I said, do you like dark meat or white meat? What does it matter? she said. And I said, It matters because I like dark meat, so if you like dark meat too then we should order by the piece and she sighed the Monumental Sigh of Womankind and said, Fine, I'll eat the white meat! and placed the order and both of us stared at the chickens twirling helplessly on their spits. And of course when we got home she reached for a piece of dark meat and of course I said, See, I knew this would happen and she said, What? then shook her head and we proceeded to the feature attraction, starring the Woman Who Refuses to Think About Anyone Else and the Man So Petty It Boggles the Mind, which lasted for the next thirty-six hours, until I was scheduled to depart, without a farewell, and sort of intentionally peed on her toilet seat.

[Nick Ink]

I'm reading Will Self's The Butt now. It's good - the mood is sinister and uncanny, but there's a thick strand of dry humour too. And as usual with WS, there's a word I've never heard before on every other page. Luckily, there are also really concise, clever little images everywhere too, like 'fishermen whipping the sea', for example. I'll probably be done with it in a day or two, as I'm sitting around waiting half the day now that I'm on jury service.

[Maaik]

Got to see Jonathan Franzen read from Freedom last night as the keynote to the Decatur Book Festival.  It was really really good.  I'm going to have to read that.

[G.C.R]

At the tip shop yesterday I found a tiny thin paperback that I hadn't read since I was 12, and had only the vaguest memories of.

It's a biography of a man's pet screech owl. It's pretty lovely. Cost a dollar.

[davy]

That looks excellent. The title is amazing.

Isn't William Service sort of famous?

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah Grace that seems to be the best thing.

[what whale]

So I decided, what with a few major changes in my life right now, that it's time to read Infinite Jest.  Bought it Saturday, opened it tonight, and laughed for eight straight pages.  Exciting!

[davy]

I've never actually read William Gibson, but I love the jacket for his new book:

[mixed cats]

I almost started The Difference Engine a couple nights ago but I read a little book about a whale instead. I've only read three Gibson novels and two were his other two most recent so I am not as awesome as I could be.

Also I am getting pretty close to hitting my 25 books read this year goal which is light years ahead of 2009 (where I'm pretty sure I only read nine).

[jm]

Damn.  I think that the summer when I forced myself to read a shitload of books, I only read maybe 20 or so.  I don't know how I could possibly find the time to read more than 10 or so books a year, maximum.

[what whale]

Damn.  I think that the summer when I forced myself to read a shitload of books, I only read maybe 20 or so.  I don't know how I could possibly find the time to read more than 10 or so books a year, maximum.

2007 was my Year of the Book.  I was commuting insane hours each day and thus constantly reading.  I bet I read a book a week (plus) in 2007.  For all the bullshit, 2007 was a helluva fucking year.

[mixed cats]

I used to read a lot of books for leisure in high school, and when I was in college and needed a humanities elective, I picked the ones that read a novel every week. I also read a ton in 2007 due to a heinous train commute. 2008 and 2009 were very lacking bookwise, so now I'm back into the groove of staying up until 2 every night.

[Anne the Man]

I'm reading Moby Dick, I'm going to be one of those people who have read Moby Dick. I like it so far. Once you get into the rhythm of that old-fashioned writing it's quite relaxing. I haven't yet hit any of the passages Dad told me about (it was a birthday present) that are amazing and sound like they could have been written yesterday. Not getting much time to read it though, due to diving my time between school and inertia and friends.

[davy]

Moby Dick rules.

[auto-da-fey]

Read Doctorow's Ragtime this week, my first ever encounter with the author (M is teaching it in a class and passed her desk copy onto me). I found it pretty offputting at first--I'm just not into that Great Tapestry of American Modernism thing, generally speaking (and probably with big exceptions like say DeLillo's Underworld)--but once I settled into its style about 70 pages in, I did get swept up in it. Ultimately, there were still too many flat subplots (esp. the JP Morgan stuff) for me to fully endorse its masterpiece-reputation, and I wound up wishing Coalhouse Walker Jr. had played a more prominent role, because the novel really comes alive when he's the focus, but there were enough wonderful elements (Houdini in general, the Emma Goldman/Evelyn Nesbit scene, the very incremental charting of modern sexuality, etc.) for me to admire the book.

Not sure if I'll read more Doctorow, but if I do, pretty sure it would be The Book of Daniel, if only because I have a copy and have never seen the Sidney Lumet film of it and that might spur me back into action on the Lumet front that I was so obsessive about a few years ago. 

[elpollodiablo]

I really dug the Waterworks, though it felt kind of by-the-numbers. Almost workshoppy.

What do you mean by the Great Tapestry of American Modernism? That's not at all how I'd characterize Underworld.

[auto-da-fey]

yeah, you're probably right; just being even lazier than usual here, and I think failing to pull apart the strands to isolate what I truly don't like. as a general rule I tend to feel somer antipathy toward big panoramic works that try to capture historical change and/or eras through individual characters, but even upon writing that I realize it's a very knee-jerk stance because a) that's kind of what a significant chunk of literature does, and b) the counterexamples quite likely outweigh the examples. Maybe it's just a matter of preferring smaller narrative scopes.

I think what I really found displeasing about the early parts of Ragtime was the way Doctorow goes about it--the clipped sentences had a grating effect, and the seemingly random invoking of famous names and events felt overbearing and intrusive. Over the course of the book I eased into them, but even still I feel some aversion to the book's style in general.

Not sure if that clarifies anything. But the Waterworks was his other book that caught my eye when glancing over his works.

[davy]

Oh cool, they're doing a Ragtime program at the library this month. Maybe I'll peek in.

I just started the most recent Richard Grant novel, something like 4 years after putting it on my to-read list. He used to write these Tom Robbins-ish hippie-dippie novels with titles like Tex & Molly in the Afterlife and Rumours of Spring (which M. Night Shyamalan ripped off for The Happening), and I actually quite liked them back in high school. This more recent novel, Another Green World, looks to be his first stab at literary fiction, and it received really great reviews when it was published in 2006. But it's about WWII, and you can only read so many books about WWII before your brain shuts off. I picked it up last night after reading through some old reviews I'd written of his earlier work. So far, so good.

Dig the handsome jacket:

[auto-da-fey]

the clipped sentences had a grating effect,

also I realize this might bode poorly for my next (and probably final for the foreseeable future) fictional undertaking, The Road.

[Greg Nog]

Getting pretty close to the end of Perfume now (and still loving it!), so I picked up Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  2010 NPR-crowd cultural literacy ahoy!

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I hated what I read of The Corrections, but regardless, I'm interested in your take on the new one, Greg!