Books this year: a book diary

I’ve never been a comic book/graphic novel reader. I read the occasional issue as a kid, but they were always single issues, usually from the middle of some story arc or other - so my experiences reading comics as a kid were sort of like watching an episode of Lost without ever having heard of the show before. Even when my horizons broadened and I realized there existed both limited-run series and self-contained graphic novels - the idea of which appealed to me, at least in theory - I never got around to actually giving the medium another try. Earlier this year, though, I read some interesting things about Watchmen, decided I’d been missing out on something all these years, and finally took the plunge.

It was both incredibly fun to read and really depressing.

It was fun because it’s a new medium for me, and I had a number of “Did they just do that? Yes, they did, and it was awesome” moments (like I did reading Barthelme’s short fiction). Moore and Gibbons are both aware of the possibilities and limitations of the medium, and do things that can’t be done (or, at least, done well) on film or in a text-only book. As an example: there’s a comic-within-the-comic, which is being read by a minor character. The mise en abyme is a common device, but this medium allows the inner and outer narratives to progress simultaneously:

In a play (or movie, or TV show) or a book, while the two narrative levels might be visible at the same time,  one is usually dominant. Here, though, the inner and outer narratives are like two voices in a fugue: independent, simultaneous, and interacting harmonically.

It’s a downer to read because it’s set in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, in a world where tensions between the USSR and the USA are about to erupt into full-scale nuclear war. Despite the fact that nobody’s really worried about nuclear war anymore (though there are good reasons to still be worried about it), our fears about terrorism are more or less equivalent to Cold-War-era fears about mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is, furthermore, set in a world with polarized, partisan politics, a Republican party trending to the far right, concerns about international backlash against aggressive American foreign policy, and a fracturing, antagonistic society - all things we (still) have today. It’s not merely perceptive about the time it was written in, it’s turned out to be unsettlingly prescient.

There are differences, of course, this being a work of speculative fiction. The big one is the existence of “superheroes” - or “costumed adventurers,” as they’re called in the book - but they’re just masked vigilantes, and are about as nice as you’d expect a masked vigilante to be. There’s Dr. Manhattan, an actual superhuman, but he’s thoroughly indifferent to humanity’s fate, and does little more than observe throughout the novel. Indeed, his only significant action in the novel is, well, morally dubious. I won’t say more, because I’m oddly reluctant to spoil the end of a novel that was published two decades ago.

The questions the novel raises - about the limits of power, about the justification of the means by the end, about the costs of peace, about the futility of human endeavors - are questions we still wrestle with today. Those are questions humanity’s wrestled with a long time, though it seems we wrestle with them not because there are no answers, but because we don’t like the answers there are.

Ken and I discovered Philip K. Dick sometime around our junior year of high school - 1998 or so. We read anything by him we could get our hands on, which was a fair amount, but there were several of his novels that were (and probably still are) out of print, novels we knew by title alone, having run across them on sprawling, poorly-constructed fansites in the days before the Wikipedia and CSS and an Internet where decent content is more distinguishable from the background noise of total crap than it used to be.

Our Friends From Frolix 8 was one of those novels (as was The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, which has one of the best titles of any novel, ever). So when I ran across a copy at a Half-Price Books recently, I had to buy it, knowing that it probably wasn’t going to be very good, because how often do you find a cheap used copy of a book you’ve been meaning to buy for the last ten years? (Okay, so I haven’t been actively looking for it, or I’d have just ordered it from Amazon - they have plenty of cheap used copies.)

Anyway. It’s not a very good novel. No, scratch that, it’s a terrible novel. It’s one of the worst novels I’ve read in a long  time.

The novel’s most egregious fault is its lack of a coherent plot.  There are at least three sequences of events that could be called “plots,” but despite the fact that they occur simultaneously and involve the same characters, they don’t work well together. Worse, Dick can’t seem to decide which is the real plot, and which are subplots. Worst, none of them are brought to any sort of conclusion; the novel ends with a tangled clusterfuck of loose ends. There are at least a half-dozen nontrivial characters who simply disappear mid-novel, and two of the most important characters drop off in the last chapters, right before they confront one another in a scene that ought to have been the climax of the novel.

The novel read like a really half-assed amalgam of scenes and characters that Dick did really well in other novels - like someone with a basic knowledge of English found a box with falling-apart copies of Solar Lottery, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, maybe The World Jones Made or The Man in the High Castle, and a collection of short stories, took 180 pages at random, translated them into Urdu or Romanian or something, and then had them transalted back into English by someone who didn’t really know either language, and then published it without any editing. It’s bad.

A look at Dick’s bibliography offers some insight:  Our Friends From Frolix 8 was written in 1969, after an extremely prolific decade. He only wrote six more novels before his death in 1982: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; A Scanner Darkly; Radio Free Albemuth; and the VALIS Trilogy. It’s almost as though Our Friends was written as a coda to a variety of ideas and themes that characterized Dick’s work up to that point; his last six novels differ in significant ways to his previous work (though there are, certainly, significant similarities as well). That still doesn’t make it a good novel, but it might explain why it seems so lazily-cobbled-together.

It seems somehow wrong to criticize so harshly a novel by a man whose novels I tend to find visionary and disturbing, but this novel isn’t worth reading, unless you happen to be writing a book abut his work, or you’re a masochist. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

This is a fascinating book. Of course, it will only be fascinating for people who have read a fair amount of Williams’ work and enjoyed it enough to read a book of criticism about it, which I realize is a fairly small group of people. And a significant part of what makes it fascinating is the questions it raises and leaves unaddressed, which can be frustrating. Still: a very interesting book.

Fundamental to this book is Dunning’s assertion that the occult was a far greater part of Williams’ life and writing than has previously been acknowledged. It is well known that he joined the hermetic/occult Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1917 (at the age of 31), but his involvement has generally been downplayed. However, Williams was not only a member for at least a decade, he was an active and advancing member, and served as Magister Templi for period in the 1920s. Furthermore, he was significantly influenced by the Rites of the FRC and the writings of its founder, A.E. Waite.

Dunning examines the role of the occult and the clash between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in Williams’ body of work using two sets of ideas borrowed from Kierkegaard: the three existential stages and Religions A & B. I’m not at all familiar with Kierkegaard’s writing, so I don’t know how accurately Dunning outlines those ideas, or how well I understood his outline, but I’ll attempt to define the idea as they’re used in the book.

The three existential stages, in order, are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Dunning acknowledges that the stages are more a continuum than discrete entities, but he then employs them as though each stage was antithetical to the others; Kierkegaard, though, wrote about them as though the higher stages contained or synthesized the lower stages.

Dunning uses the existential stages to discuss characters in Williams’ novels, plays, and the Arthuriad, as well as Williams himself. Dunning argues throughout the book that Williams’ body of work displays a fundamental incoherence owing largely to his attempts to reconcile the aesthetic and religious stages. There are, certainly, a several major characters whose religious authority flows from their poetic genius – Peter Stanhope in Descent Into Hell and Taliessin in the Arthuriad, for example - but I’m not sure that they’re problematic because Williams is trying to make them occupy two existential spaces at once (though they are, certainly, difficult characters).

The concept of Religion A and Religion B is less well-defined in Dunning’s book, and, so far as I can tell, a fairly minor part of Kierkegaard’s thought. Dunning defines Religion A as pantheism, with an emphasis on the immanence of God, and Religion B as Christianity, with an emphasis on the transcendence of God. The problem, of course, is that Christianity emphasizes both the transcendence and the immanence of God, so Dunning’s “Religion A vs. Religion B” dichotomy is one of the book’s biggest weaknesses. It would have been more accurate to have employed a “hermetic-heterodox vs. orthodox” scheme to discuss those influences in Williams’ work.

Despite the weakness of the terms he uses, Dunning’s analysis of the conflict between hermetism and orthodoxy in Williams’ writing is, generally, very insightful, especially when it comes to Shadows of Ecstasy, the first novel Williams wrote (though it was published fifth) - written, furthermore, during the period of Williams’ most active involvement with the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. The novel’s central character,  Nigel Considine, has become an “Adept of the Mysteries,” which has allowed him to remain in the prime of life for nearly two hundred years; he is, essentially, immortal, vulnerable only to an extremely sudden and catastrophic wounding. The novel concerns itself with (among other things) his plan to conquers death by committing suicide and resurrecting himself. The fascinating thing about the novel is Williams’ obvious attraction to Considine; and, though Considine dies at the end, the possibility that he might succeed in bringing himself back from death is left open. It is a profoundly ambiguous novel, and Dunning deftly traces this ambiguity as Williams wrestles with it throughout his work.

I wish Dunning had handled the “Kierkegaardian” aspect of the work differently; trying to lift a few ideas to use as critical tools from as difficult a thinker as Kierkegaard - with his numerous pseudonyms, none of whom agree or represent what he actually thought - is an exercise in futility. But there is much to study in terms of the influence Kierkegaard had on Williams, and a number of big questions: when did Williams first read Kierkegaard? How did he come to be the editor for the first English translations of Kierkegaard’s works? What was Williams writing at the time? What did he write about Kierkegaard in correspondence or journals?

I also wish the conflict between the hermetic theology of the FRC and the orthodoxy of Anglicanism had been framed in those (their own) terms, rather than “Religions A and B.” Further, I think Dunning ought to have mentioned his own theological leanings; his discussion of Williams’ theology is colored by his own theology, and I should have liked that theology to be made explicit. There are large grey areas in Williams’ writing, theologically speaking, but I think there are relatively few - and maybe no - areas of actual heresy, if one’s definition of orthodoxy is the Creeds. Dunning seems to disagree, but as he never states his theological position or offers a definition of orthodoxy, it’s hard to argue with him.

Despite my criticisms, I found the book to be intellectually stimulating and well worth the time and effort, and I’ll certainly be revisiting it as I continue to read and struggle with Williams. It’s earned its place on my shelf.

I first heard of Donald Barthelme only recently, and I can’t now remember what the context was; whatever it was, I was sufficiently intrigued that I tracked down the library’s copy of Forty Stories and read a few, as a sample. I was impressed enough to read the rest.

Barthelme’s short stories are really short; there are a handful in this collection that approach the dozen-page mark, but most are in the 4-6 page range. And they’re all over the map in terms of subject matter and style: some are fairly “realistic” snapshots of moments in someone’s life, and some are like the most ludicrous dream you ever had, and some are weirder than that.

They were, on the whole, amazing. I love experimental writing (and film), but it can get old if done poorly, or too self-consciously, or for too long. There was only one of the stories in this collection that was unreadable: “Great Days,” which was 11 pages of non sequiters. Another came close: “The Sentence,” which was one long run-on, that didn’t even have a period at the end, but the content triumphed over the somewhat annoying device.

Most of them, though, left me slack-jawed in amazement that he’d not only gotten away with the absurd but done it well. The story about the wounded torero, with the ringing bull at the end? It gets weirder with every word. The story about Bluebeard’s seventh wife? It ends with a room full of zebra carcasses. In another story, he has Goethe say things like: “Actors are the Scotch weevils in the salt pork of honest effort.” What the hell does that even mean? He has Paul Klee as an engineer-private who loses a plane somewhere in Germany during WWI. He has St. Anthony living in the suburbs, before he’s run out of town. He has a group of friends planning a party for one of their number, at which they hang him for “going too far.”

They aren’t all so absurd, but even those which seem to describe ordinary life are generally a least a little off-kilter. I can only think of two that were basically straightforward, and they happened to be the two depressing ones.

This is definitely a book worth owning; it’s the kind of book one can pull off the shelf, read a few stories, and put back, having injected a dose of the surreal into one’s day.

You would expect a book purporting to be someone’s life and opinions to be about that person’s life. And, well, that’s the joke: Tristram Shandy contains only a few scenes from the life of Tristram Shandy. The book opens with his conception, but his birth doesn’t happen until the third volume (the book was originally published as nine short volumes over a ten-year period), and even then it happens “off-stage,” and is only mentioned briefly. Tristram is hardly a character at all in the book about his life - the major characters being his father Walter, his uncle Toby, and his uncle’s servant Trim - except as the narrator, which is the second joke: Tristram has opinions about everything, and no scruple at all about sharing them.

Not all the opinions are his, of course. His father, his uncle, and Trim all have opinions of their own, as do all the other characters, secondary, minor, and incidental, that appear in this book, and Tristram passes those opinions on to his readers, sometimes with and sometimes without comment.

This is, really, a book about nothing, the way Seinfeld was a show about nothing - that is, the plot is unimportant (and in Tristram Shandy, as good as nonexistent), but a good many subjects are discussed, though in nothing like a comprehensive or systematic way. It is full of digressions, omissions, false starts, loose ends, double entendres, puns, asides, apostrophes, and non sequiters - and, consequently, both fun and frustrating to read.

It’s hard to make a judgment about a book like this after only one reading, but I found it somewhat uneven; Sterne probably intended it to be that way, but there were some sections I had to struggle to get through. On the other hand, the parts that were funny were actually really funny, and the book as a whole is obscene, or obscene under a thin layer of winking “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I probably missed more jokes than I got, because I’m not up on my 18th-century slang; for instance, “Toby” used to mean “ass,” and “hobby-horse” used to mean “loose woman or prostitute” (among other things).

I don’t think I can recommend this book, at least in a general way; I enjoyed it, and will probably read it again, but it takes work to enjoy it, and the pleasures it offers are something of an acquired taste. It has, as I said above, very little plot, and not much in the way of character development - there is plenty of character exposition, but none of the characters change or grow or any of that nonsense; it’s more an exercise in testing the limits of the Novel as a form, as well as long dirty joke, or a series of shorter dirty jokes. If you want something of the flavor of the novel, but don’t want to invest a lot of time in something you might hate, watch the “movie” of the book: if you love it, you’ll love the book (probably), and if you hate it, you’ll hate the book. Probably.

A last word of advice: if you’re going to piss out a window, make sure the window will stay open on its own. Bad things might happen, otherwise.

I had forgotten how good this book is; the last chapters, which had always seemed a bit tacked-on and anti-climactic, especially surprised me.

The Battle of the Pelennor Fields did not disappoint. It was full of stirring calls to battle and blood and death and destruction; the slaying of the chief Nazgul was especially good (although I must confess Tolkien’s having his cloak fall empty to the ground Kenobi-style isn’t quite as impressive as Jackson’s imploding-Nazgul bit).

The way Tolkien brought the different narrative threads together for the battle chapter was masterful; after spending a few chapters on the Rohirrim and Aragorn’s taking the Paths of the Dead with Legolas, Gimli, and the Dunedain, he moves the action to Gondor, and brings us all the way through the night when the armies of Mordor lay siege to Minas Tirith. That chapter ends with the confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King - who then departs, because the Riders of Rohan have arrived. And then, having seriously whetted our appetites for carnage and valourous deeds, Tolkien jumps back and recounts the journey of the Riders from Dunharrow to Minas Tirith, which takes a whole damn chapter, but the added wait makes the Battle all the better when he finally gets to it. (But, wisely, he waits to fill us in on Aragorn’s doings between his arrival at the Rock of Erect and his arrival the Battle until after the battle is over.)

My new favourite chapter  is “The Scouring of the Shire.” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about anarchy as a political program, and while reading the Lord of the Rings, it’s occurred to me that anarchism and monarchism are a lot more compatible than one might think. And when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin finally return to the Shire to find it much worse than they left it - in the throes of a brutal, Communistic industrialization carried out by Saruman and his henchmen - the natural affinity of those two political philosophiesis highlighted. The presence of a King in Minas Tirith - who has reasserted his claim to all the ancient realm of Gondor, including the Shire - makes the hobbits’ overthrow of Saruman possible and ensures a lasting peace in the Shire, but it’s the hobbits’ assertion of their right to live free and unmolested that actually produces the desired result. And, beautifully, the hobbits form an ad hoc and (mostly) decentralized militia to accomplish the removal of Saruman, all on very short notice.

I want to mention one last thing, which is how well Tolkien handles the interplay of sorrow and joy. I’m only going to mention it, and say that the last chapter moved me almost to tears, and leave it at that. Well, almost: Peter Jackson’s most serious fault in filming these books was his reduction of the rich emotional tapestry Tolkien wove to trite, maudlin sentimentality and ham-fisted attepmts to manipulate his audience’s emotions.

So. If you’ve never read the trilogy, or it’s been more than a few years, do yourself a favour and read them.

“The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.”

So ends The Two Towers. It’s a great ending for the middle book of a trilogy, and the suspense is heightened by the fact that The Return of the King doesn’t pick up Frodo and Sam’s thread of the story for nearly 200 pages, dealing instead with the opening of war between Mordor and the Free Peoples of the West.

I really like the way Tolkien structured this novel (or these two sections of his novel which is usually published as three volumes - however you want to think of it). Book III deals with (basically) everyone who’s not Sam, Frodo, or Gollum; it is largely concerned with Gandalf’s ’setting the pieces’ for the coming war. Book IV follows Frodo, Sam, and Gollum from the Emyn Muil to the pass of Cirith Ungol, where Gollum finally betrays Frodo in an attempt to regain the Ring.

I had never before paid attention to Tolkien’s prose style, and I think I was a little worried that it would be a bit overblown, with excessive descriptive passages and painful similes. I have been pleasantly surprised; Tolkien’s prose is well-constructed and fluid, and a pleasure to read.

I was struck by how little violence occurs “on-screen” in this book; Boromir’s last stand, the routing of Saruman’s Orcs by the Rohirrim, the routing of the Southrons by Faramir’s band, and the destruction of Isengard all occur while our attention is elsewhere, and what we learn of them is second-hand, when characters who were present for the events recount them to others later. Even the battle at Helm’s Deep, though occuring in the narrative present, is light on descriptions of the actual fighting, and most of the great host of Orcs is destroyed by the Huorns, who arrive and depart under the cover of night. The most violent scene in the whole book is Sam’s fights with Gollum and Shelob on the pass of Cirith Ungol (the fights occur separately but consecutively, which is why I’m considering them one scene).

I don’t know why Tolkien chose to do it that way; I don’t think it’s because he lacked the skill to convincingly write a battle scene, but I suppose that’s a possibility. Maybe his experiences in WWI were a factor, but maybe not. The Return of the King covers the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which is hugely important, as well as the desperate assualt on the Black Gate; I’m interested to see how he handles those battles.

Lastly, I’d like to say that, while Peter Jackson’s films are fun to watch, I am totally baffled by some of the changes he made in his adaptation of this book, especially the detour of Sam and Frodo to Osgiliath with Faramir. That annoys me more than the elves at Helm’s Deep.

One of the great pleasures of reading, despite what Kenneth might say, is re-reading books you have read before. You notice things you didn’t notice before; you catch allusions that had previously eluded you; you are able to plumb further into the book’s depths of meaning. Or you find, sometimes, that it probably wasn’t worth reading in the first place. So far, this trilogy has been well worth the re-reading.

The first thing that struck me was how English the first part of the book is; the hobbits’ journey across the Shire, and even as far as Bree, is very reminiscent of Joseph Andrews, and probably every other English “road novel” of the 18th century. It’s very episodic, and there is eating and drinking and talking to folk all the way to Bree; even the Nazgul aren’t as threatening in the Shire as they are in the wild between Bree and Rivendell. The Shire and the countryside as far as Bree are also very English; rolling hills and farms and hedges and inns and whatnot.

Tom Bombadil always mystified me, and continues to do so, though now in a different way. Tolkien’s cosmology (at least so far as I understand it, never having read the Silmarillion) is different from the medieval one that Lewis describes in The Discarded Image, but it is similar insofar as it is ordered and categorized; and as the medieval world had figures that existed outside the cosmic order, so Middle Earth has Bombadil.

The pastoral quality of those first chapters quickly gives way to darker tones, of course, once the hobbits arrive in Bree. I used to think, when I was much younger, that this first book was interminably slow until after the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, and didn’t really get interesting until they arrived in Moria. It is, I suppose, slow in terms of action, but richly painted, even if the pallette Tolkien uses is composed of drab, wintry colors. I had forgotten, or had not noticed before, the profound sadness that lies just below the surfage throughout much of the book, bubbling to the surface at the oddest moments, in Rivendell and Lothlorien.

Aragorn, too, is more sorrowful than I remember. He is not, for most of the book, exactly kingly. He reminds me more of an Old Testament prophet; wise, but with a wisdom that comes from long years of wandering in exile. After Gandalf falls in Moria and he becomes leader of the Fellowship, he is often unsure, and delays the question of the Fellowship’s path - to Gondor or Mordor - as long as possible (and, indeed, Frodo decides the matter for him). But, almost at the end of this book, a change comes over him, as they pass the ancient northern border of Gondor, on the Anduin just above the falls of Rauros, and he finally returns to the land of his fathers, an exile no longer. Indeed, this is the point at which Tolkien ceases to refer to him as Strider, and he calls himself by the name Galadriel had recently given him: Elessar, the Elfstone. It’s a beautiful moment, and one of the few moments of hope in the entire book.

I can’t wait to start the next one.

I’ve been reading this book to Elanor at bedtime for the last few weeks; it took a fair amount of self-control to not read ahead. Like The Wolves in the Walls, it is both a scary children’s story and an absolutely terrifying story for adults.

Coraline and her parents live in a flat in an old house that’s been apartmentalized. One day, bored, she finds a door with a brick wall behind it, which used to lead into the part of the house which is now another flat. Except, sometimes, the door opens onto a dark corridor into somewhere else. The “crazy old man upstairs,” who has a mouse circus, delivers her a message from the mice the day after she finds the door: don’t go through the door. But, of course, she does.

It ends well, being a story for children, but its theme of love vs. possession is (or was for me, anyway) pretty unsettling. There are also plenty of things that go bump in the dark, and nearly every chapter ends on a suspenseful note. Gaiman is a master, and he’s in top form here. Find a copy and read it; you won’t be disappointed.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has one of the best opening lines of any novel, ever: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Though you don’t realize it until you’re lost somewhere in the middle of the novel, that line contains hints of most of the major themes of the book: war, memory, a maddeningly unspecific chronology, solitude (he is, after all, facing the firing squad alone), loss, death, and the discovery of the wonders of the larger world.

Of course, a great opener does not a great novel make, but this is indeed a great novel. It’s set in Colombia, though the country’s name is never mentioned, in the fictional town of Macondo. When the novel is set is a trickier question, because of Marquez’s chronological reticence, but the founding of Macondo probably occured sometime around 1860, based on my guess at the Colonel’s age at the beginning of the Thousand Days War.

Marquez’s handling of time is one of the beautiful things about this book. He makes frequent reference to the month or day of the week when something happened, but he never mentions the year. He is never specific about how long a state of affairs endures, beyond “years” or “many years.” He likewise never tells us how old any of the characters are, with a few exceptions: the approximate ages of children are given, sometimes, and the ages of a few old women are given, but with a margin of error of at least a decade. That lack of a detailed chronology is only the beginning, however. Marquez constantly looks to the future and to the past, so much so that one is not always sure if the character he’s just killed off is actually dead yet, or just going to die sometime in the next fifty pages.

The firing squad is an excellent example of this. The “[some amount of time] later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia …” construction occurs half a dozen times (or more) before he actually faces the firing squad nearly halfway through the book, and it’s remembered several times after that, by various characters. Also, several of his kinsmen also face firing squads at various times, and each actual facing is preceded by at least one of the “[some amount of time] later” statements.

Another recurring theme of the novel is the re-occurrence of events, names, relationships, and characters. Characters re-occur in several ways: the Aurelianos tend to have the personality traits, as do the Jose Arcadios; Melquiades and Pilar Ternera have similar relationships with the Buendia men all down the line; and the dead never really go away.

There is no good answer to the question “what is it about?,” but a stab at one might be: the decline and fall of the Buendia line. The feeling that catastrophe is hanging over them grows slowly, imperceptibly at first, but it becomes increasingly oppressive as time passes. The prose changes colors from bright and enchanting to stark and haunting, and the final pages are a terrifying revelation, at least to the last of the Buendias. The novel ends with a line as good as the one it began with: “…races condemned to one hundred years of solitude [do] not get a second chance on earth.”