Books this year: a book diary

I tried to read something else; 62 by Cortazar. Something experimental, something adult. But the pull was too great, and I gave in. I had to finish, had to find out what happened. To the little kids in the fantasy novel. SHUT UP IT’S GOOD.

The Amber Spyglass wraps up the His Dark Materials trilogy. Trying to separate the books makes for a bit of a quandary, especially when read back-to-back, as they form a cohesive piece. But The Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy ending to the trilogy.

I will not explore the grievances I might have had with Pullman’s humanistic evangelical approach as I originally planned. Laying out my concerns to my roommate, she stated that she was unaware of the background of the novel, and thus didn’t notice when she should have taken offense. This seems like the most desirable position. If you have a novel for kids where God is getting killed, the lines are probably already drawn on whether you can enjoy it or not, regardless of what the author’s intent was.

The book follows two children as they attempt to bring about a second fall. Introduced are new characters and worlds and creatures, and the book is by far the most imaginative of the three in terms of content. The protagonists go to a world with miniature spies with poison-tipped spurs who travel on dragon flies, to the land of the dead, and to the home that the Authority (God) lives in.

What’s amazing is that Pullman dispenses with much of the religious overtones with over a hundred pages to go, and shows that the story is largely about love. Not love in a bullshit humanistic-hold-hands-fellow-men kind of way, but love in the sense that we all, if we are lucky, have experienced it growing up: the feeling that you aren’t a kid anymore, because you love. And it’s weird, and it’s sexual, and it’s confusing, and you know you’re still a kid, but you don’t want to be, and you figure out that this is the color of life that you have been missing. Pullman manages to capture this almost pitch-perfectly. And there are still little midget dudes running around with spurs on dragonflies.

I can see this book changing a kid’s life, probably for the better. And I can see it being helpful to occasionally be reminded of the wonder of logic and love as an adult.

I had no prior knowledge of Man in the High Castle going into it. It was part of the included novels in the Library of America’s compendium.

I didn’t know that it was alternate history, and not futuristic science fiction as most of Dick’s other works that I’ve read have been. I didn’t know the basic plot, nor that the ending is somewhat famous for its ambiguity.

The thrust of the novel seems to be how we perceive truth. The novel takes the premise that the Axis won World War II, that American culture has been dominated by Japan, and that the Jews are still being persecuted under the rein of the Reich.

In many sections, Dick points to this question of perception. One of the clearest examples deals with the history of a lighter. One lighter, presented by a character in the book, is highly precious, full of historic value, valuable. The other is an ordinary lighter. The character presented with the lighters is unable to tell them apart, and even doubts that either is worth anything.

Beyond this, Dick introduces themes of how we perceive his novel. The question of whether alternate reality fiction, through a book-within-a-book device used, constitutes “science fiction” is even brought up.

Dick, as always, seems to be getting at something whereby he wishes to eat his own tail. As always, it’s endlessly fascinating and about as thought provoking as genre fiction gets.
The ending, detested by someone else I talked to who had read the book, is a stunning bit of brilliance. Here, Dick wraps up many of the threads of the book while leaving a giant puzzle to the reader. What are we reading? What is Dick’s real aim? The ambiguity is not so much within the plot, but as to what Dick’s overall thesis is in regards to his own fiction.

Ulysses is a monolith of English literature; the divisive elephant in the room, 800-pages of nigh on rambling that requires a genius to grasp its jokes, references, allusions, puns. Much of it is written in other languages. Much of it is written in Irish colloquial language. Much of it is written in a sort of Frankenstein English pieced together by Joyce. The book constantly shifts styles between sections, some notoriously elaborate and hard to follow. And then there’s the schemata. The horrible, horrible fucking schemata that is the promised puzzlebox by Joyce that has kept research on the book almost an arm of academia unto itself.

Joyce constructed the whole thing to follow the plot of The Odyssey. Supposedly, there are all sorts of references to numerology. The whole thing can be read upside down, backwards, and the secrets of the Universe are revealed. Honestly, I have no fucking clue what the undertow of the book is.
Even more honestly, most of the time I was trying to grasp just what the hell was going on. Take this section:

“Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hoky-poky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I’m sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a big spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding.”

A character is on the beach, observing others, sees a family together, with children enjoying lollipops, which is compared to the Eucharist. I think. Not really sure.

So why in the fuck would anyone not simply dismiss this book as a textbook example of assholes’ English, as I believe Nathan and Ken do, meant to be simple masturbation by Joyce in how well he can write labyrinth English? I can’t really argue that that’s not fair, since I certainly don’t believe I had the deeper understanding of many of the themes supposedly present in the novel. But I don’t regret the two weeks I spent reading it. And I would, if someone truly grasped it, believe a person’s claim that it is one of the greatest novels ever.

The novel is worth slogging through by the laymen for no other reason than to be impressed, and at times oppressed, by Joyce’s English. Here is example after example of a man taking the language that we encounter everyday, the banal English of newspapers, blogs, and texts, broken, bent, crushed, vomited into a thousand shards of prose. And to go ahead and hit the charge that this makes it simply an act of technical writing, this is an effective technique as far as artistry goes. For every ten lines of incomprehensible or overly dense text, there will be one line that jumps out as pure beauty. And more so than a lot of books I’ve read, it changed how I even look at the world. Stream of conscious brought to consciousness, acknowledged, distanced; how information is perceived, how we receive it, what we expect. Any book that can claim to change how you perceive the world, even for a brief time, deserves some modicum of respect.

“I’m just wondering if I’m missing something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It scratches some primal urge.”
“What?”
“The man-itch. You don’t have the man-itch. That’s why you don’t like Bukowski.”

I am not ready to completely write off Charles Bukowski. There is something there that I can see as being more substantial. But I am pretty goddamn close.

My first go was his first novel, Post Office. It chronicles his drunken exploits for 11 years sorting mail for the postal service. The book manages to eek out a couple of chuckles amidst a fairly bleak portrait of 70’s America: dead-end jobs, poverty, drunkeness, tedium, beauracracies and corporations eating the souls of individuals.

I didn’t find Post Office great, but liked it well enough to read Bukowski’s third novel, Women. With my second brush is when I turned my opinion.

I am not completely devoid of understanding as to Bukowski’s charms. I understand why it’s fun to read. I understand that it might speak to some way of thinking that does exist within the American male. It’s when the claim comes in that there is something more to him than a humorous, dirty read that the hair on my neck pricks up.

Certainly, there are moments of a deeper thought process. Especially in Women, towards the end, Bukowski (as his alter-ego Henry Chinaski)  becomes reflective of what he represents. It’s in these moments when his literature seems to be a weapon against himself; his own self-destructive tendencies turned in prose form onto himself.

“How could I call myself a man? How could I write poems? What did
I consist of? I was a Bush-league de Sade, without his intellect. A
murderer was more straightforward and honest than I was. Or a rapist.”

But generally, from what I gathered, the self-flagellation is submerged under a thick layer of autofellatio. These moments of honest are tinged with notes of hyperbole, and seemingly without higher thought processes as to why he was the way he was. Possibly he is being true–he lacks de Sade’s intellect.

And for the few passages of psychic vivisection, there are reams of paper spent detailing his drinking and fucking. And it becomes hard for me not to compare it to the other greats of the same “Live Hard” school of writing. Bukowski lacks the intellect and depth of Miller; the humour of Thompson; the imagination of Burroughs. It’s as if someone took the poetic, philosophical passages out of Sexus and left the fucking. Was I to be impressed that he had, as he boasts, 300 hangovers a year? Why? He doesn’t really get into what possibly caused his alcoholism. He doesn’t even really get into his thought processes. It’s simply–I got up, I drank, I fucked; I called a woman who wanted to meet me and I fucked her; and then I drank and went to get more drunk and saw a woman and fucked her. For 300 pages. Over two books. Seemingly over a whole career.

Possibly I am missing the essential man-itch that would part the skies and reveal why there is more here; I am told that reading his poetry is key to understanding the higher-thought processes of the novels. And it’s not that I completely detest him. But the whole time I was reading Women, my copy of Plexus was calling to me.

Let’s go ahead and include a bit of poetry as well. I was told that the whole thing would click once I read the poetry, and to start with a small bit called Bluebird. Reading it, I liked it. I thought that it made the books appear in a different light. “You want to blow my book sales in Europe?” But I stand by my thoughts, and the poem only seems to hone them: he is acting, he is blowing bravado, the same mold as every “tough” American mold, only for a more intellectual crowd. The nihilism is the undertow of the book, but the surface is cheering at his ability to do these things and get away with it.

The Plague is a 1948 novel by French existentialist Albert Camus, detailing an outbreak of plague in Oran.

To my mind, Camus, from what I have read, has written two Great books: The Stranger, and Myth of Sisyphus. Everything else has been good, but none have reached the heights that those two works did. I guess it is somewhat simple-minded to fault a writer for only writing two masterpieces.

The Plague, for me, falls into the good category. There are moments of greatness: a description of the burial procedures in the town as the plague worsens, and the main protagonist’s, Dr. Rieux, trial of a vaccine upon a near-death child.

The novel makes a compelling statement about the war. Written in 1948, the parallel between a town dealing with unspeakable horror that made them question the very nature of their life and what makes it worth living wouldn’t have been lost on occupied France.

The writing, as well, is much more polished than Exile and the Kingdom, which seemed stilted and leaden at times to me. But neither equal the quiet, unstrained prose of The Stranger.

Worth reading, as long as you don’t expect something on the order of Camus’ masterpieces.

Also, I would like to credit the book with protecting the vital contents of my lap from a cup of scalding hot coffee. This fact alone almost makes me want to elevate the status of the book to Camus’ best work.

Missionary Position is written by an asshole. To note, the kind of asshole that admiration of taints the admirers’ own character. As my friend Julia put it, “Don’t you find Christopher Hitchens kind of arrogant? It just seems like the people who like him are kind of arrogant, too.”

And I generally hold that to be true. But it doesn’t stop me from gleaning some enjoyment from the book. Alas, I understand if the average person will get the creeps laughing at a

screed written against a dead saint who devoted her old age to missionary work in underdeveloped parts of the world.  I accept and understand your judgment.

Hitchens’ main attack is to point out that Mother Theresa often inserts herself into delicate political situations, often on the wrong side, due to her vehement anti-abortion stance. He cites instance after instance in which she supports regimes that were abhorrent because they opposed abortion or contraceptives.

In the most startling section, Hitchens quotes from others’ notes on the conditions of Mother Theresa’s facilities. Couches are thrown away, carpets torn up in San Francisco; dirty needles are washed in the sink in Calcutta. Where Hitchens point becomes a little more divisive will be in his painting Mother Theresa as simply another person out to grab personal power. Occasionally, this is done in an abrasive manner that may rub some the wrong way. He attacks her for forgiving him for his charges against her. This might lose some readers who are more on the fence about Hitchens’ other points. But then again, it wouldn’t be in keeping with his style if there weren’t a few of those.

The book will almost certainly rankle some sort of strong emotion out of whoever reads it. But so would reading Bill O’Reilly’s latest. The saving grace for me would be his larger points that so often people are willing to be duped by their leaders, that so often those in power are the most base and calculating. The political machinations detailed are needed to support his point, certainly, but also the most tiring. I’ve given up on the whole system, because I’ve already learned the lesson that the real assholes are the ones with the most power.

Further thoughts after I had written my original: I was discussing the book with my roommate Chris, who had recommended the book to me. I said that while I liked it, I still had reservations about Hitchens. He pointed out to me that one of the reasons he admired Hitchens’ book was that, like Nietzsche, he had chosen one person to attack an ideology. He said that while Hitchens overarching attack may not have been as grandiose as some of Nietzsche’s attacks, that it still bore some similarity.

I have to admit that after approaching, retroactively, the book in this manner, that I found it much more intriguing. Certainly in his time, Nietzsche would have been Public Asshole #1. And his attacks often bordered on the extremely mean and personal. In the same manner, Hitchens is after unchecked demagoguery, unquestioned authority, and the selling of a public persona as a brand, often in lieu of actual works or mission statement.

 “Science is magic that works.”

I hate cleverness; quirkiness even more. So often it seems as if authors  (I will include writers of films as well) skate by on simply throwing shit at a wall and seeing if any of it sticks. It works very rarely, but seems to be acceptable to a higher degree in books.  Cleverness is a poor substitution for artistry.

Not to say that books shouldn’t be genuinely quirky, or funny, or weird. But there’s a certain literary quirkiness that rolls up some form of “social-commentary” usually based on absurdest hyperbole about the state of “modern man.”

I include among these the often praised works of Tom Robbins, White Noise by Don DeLillo, and even Brave New World, although it’s been so long since I read it that I hope no one calls me on that.

Also, inevitably, I end up liking the ends of these books much more so than the beginnings. It’s as if the author has finally culled out, through trial-and-error in the first part of the book, what doesn’t work. With all of the extraneous silliness gone, the story can rest on what strikes a note as being genuinely odd but affecting as symbols. In White Noise it’s the effects of the drug, the separation of the brain, dodging verbal bullets. In Brave New World it’s the Christ parallels at the end of the book.

Enter Cat’s Cradle. A praised novel about midgets, Calypso, fake religions, and the end of the world. I was scared by the synopsis on the back of the book, but the other Vonnegut I’d read hadn’t crossed the line of randomness for its own end. Certainly, it occasionally teetered the line, kind of like the work of Haruki Murakami, but there was always an undercurrent of genuine thought and a knowledge of what worked to keep it from tossing over. But as I read Cat’s Cradle, I couldn’t shake that Vonnegut hadn’t been able to keep it together this time. It seemed as if he were throwing his spaghetti at the wall to see if it was cooked. “So, they rub their feet together to spirit-bond! Is that something?” “The guy’s a midget! Is that a comment on society now and who runs it, or the kinds of war-mongers?” “She’s obsessed with Hoosiers! Isn’t that a delightful commentary on isolation and patriotism?”

To its favor, it’s a quick read. The kind you can speed through while sitting in an airport, after purchasing the only book not written by Mitch Albom or John Grisham. And like other quirky novels, Vonnegut gets down to brass-tacks at the end. He finally starts making his real point about the nature of man and war and patriotism and humanism without a lot of the stupid bullshit. And like every other book in the clever/quirky genre I’ve mentioned so far, I just sat and wondered why the proceeding 250 pages couldn’t have been like that all along.

My apartment (which has been dubbed the Apartyment by us who live here, and the Den of Iniquity by those who do not) has decided to start a sort of book club. In an attempt to better ourselves, isolate us more from the general populace, and increase our ass-holery exponentially, we have decided to all read “important” works at the same time. First-up was The Brothers Karamazov.

My experience with Dostoevsky up to this point has been Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, both of which I liked very much.  I have read the opening part of Notes from the Underground at least three times. I’m a masochist that way. And, much to my surprise, I didn’t find Crime and Punishment to be at all stodgy or prim; it seemed to me to be a fairly violent and captivating psychological profile. Dense, but still entertaining.

Dense, but entertaining aptly describes Karamazov, if not more so. The book clocks in at 775 pages; that isn’t Harry Potter, giant-font double spaced 775 pages, either. That’s 775 page-long paragraphs of exposition on Russian nature and God.

The book is broken into 4 parts and an epilogue, with each part containing multiple books unto itself. This gives the whole work a patch-work feeling of open-endedness. It reminded me of Don Quixote in this way; rambling, leisurely, taking its time to describe side characters and situations, anecdotes and things that would be too trivial or off the point for other novels.

Like Crime and Punishment, the book is occasionally quite bleak. The central plot revolves around a similar subject matter, and many of the main characters, save for Alyosha, are quite unlikable. There’s the crazy brother who sees the Devil but doesn’t believe in God; the brother who whores, beats up poor people, and even stomps his father’s face in; the father who abandons his children and tries to steal their fiancées; the troubled boy who stabs his classmates with knives and feeds dogs pins; and so-on.

A summation of the central plot is pointless. For one, the book doesn’t really begin to develop a plot-wise momentum until three or four hundred pages in. Secondly, it contains so many asides and digressions that it wouldn’t do it justice. Suffice to say, there is a murder, there is a trial. But there is also a book (a whole book) on the children of the town, a book of back-story for a church elder, a lengthy allegory, poems, and much more. In a way, it would be like summarizing the Bible down to “God made the Earth, had a Son, and He died,” and leaving out all the bits in between.

Like Notes from the Underground, the book could be described as a philosophical novel. Much of it centers on God. There are a few lengthy pieces that function almost solely as philosophy; like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (sometimes), Dostoevsky seems to be using a different voice to expound on philosophical concerns, and as with Kierkegaard, it becomes hard to tell what Dostoevsky’s voice is in all of it. But what does it matter? We are presented with opinions, and they are given at least a semi-fair shake; at least enough of one to not be able to clearly discern Dostoevsky’s feelings on them.

The two most interesting, for me, bits of philosophy are sections called The Grand Inquisitor and The Devil. Both revolve around the brother Ivan, the smart, socially-liberal atheist. In the Grand Inquisitor, he prepares a tale of Jesus’ return to Earth, and argues for him to be crucified again. He does so for the ideology, seemingly, that would later dominate Russia; essentially, “We have no need for your God if he can’t feed us. We reject you as you reject us, and will build our own God.” This all hinges on the three temptations of Christ in the desert, and how each, as seen through The Grand Inquisitor’s eyes, are a rejection of the majority of humanity. Again, one gets the feeling that this isn’t Dostoevsky’s views on Christ, but it is given such a clearly-argued and long section that it does lead it some ambiguity.

In the Devil, Ivan is visited by a devil, not Satan himself, who  of his desire to reject his nature, to have shouted “Hosanna!” As Christ was risen. To be mortal and moral, but the Devil understands that he can’t; there must be someone evil. Lighter in tone than The Grand Inquisitor, The Devil adds to the feeling that Karamazov is such a huge fucking world unto itself that it could conceivably contain anything within it.

For all of these Big issues in a Big book, there is a surprising level of humour and levity to the whole thing. Dmitri is often quite amusing as a character, and the same psychological keenness that Dostoevsky turns towards heavy issues is leveled at sometimes intricacies of human personality; he reveals himself to be quite a talented character-artist. Quirks of phrase, mannerism, and thought are laid out in a matter-of-fact way that could allow there underlying lightness to go unnoticed.

The Brothers Karamazov is a book by a great artist, working in a great medium, trying to cram everything in, and for the most part succeeding. More so than some of the other big, important books with revered statures (Don Quixote, especially), Karamazov is entertaining and worthy of its sprawl.

Going into a Henry Miller novel, one should know what to expect. Inevitably, someone will ask you what you are reading. And you will hold it up, and they may not know what it is, and they will think you are reading porn. And you will wonder if maybe you aren’t reading porn, and who in God’s name reads pornography?

Sexus is part of a trilogy that retells much of Miller’s life that he drew on for Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Miller approached it later in life, and gave it room to breathe. Sexus is a big book, and there are two more to go.

Sexus is porn for intellectuals. It’s an ideal male; sensitive, of a sort, intelligent, but hopelessly cruel at times, fucking anything that moves, scraping by, living according to his own morals. It’s who all college professors secretly hoped they’d grow up to be.

Miller can drag on at times; there is a particularly epic sex scene, involving Miller and two women, that drags on, and on, and on. But for the most part, Miller keeps it tight and narrative-bound, occasionally allowing himself the lyrical flights from Capricorn, but with a different sense of narrative mysticism to it. Something about the book feels otherworldly; beyond all the talk of God and the nature of things, there is an element of fantasy, albeit understated, that runs through the novel that only adds to the epic feel.

Epic novels about Plato, God, and fucking should exist more.

This is my first time contributing, so please forgive any hiccups.

I’ve long wanted to read Kaufmann’s book on Nietzsche, and finally got around to doing it. Kaufmann is well-known in his own right as a philosopher, and especially for his excellent translations of Nietzsche’s work. In this book, Kaufmann breaks down Nietzsche’s philosophy, and illuminates many misconceptions.

Thankfully, for me, Kaufmann keeps the book light on biographical information. Featuring a rough 60 or so page sketch of Nietzsche’s life, Kaufmann gives enough information to sufficiently shade in details, correct and expound on some well-known facts (including his sister and his mental illness), and give a frame of reference for where Nietzsche was when he wrote his books. From there on it is a thorough, almost text-book like examination of Nietzsche’s work. Kaufmann’s main contention is that Nietzsche’s philosophy seems easy enough to understand in isolation, but its fragmentary aphoristic style belies a hidden connection between ideas in one book and a seemingly misleading statement in another. Most of the book is Kaufmann’s attempt to link together all of Nietzsche’s ideas, piecing together Nietzsche’s aphoristic style into a cohesive flow.

Kaufmann is quite succesful. He criticizes at times, and doesn’t fail to point out when he feels Nietzsche’s arguments are illogical are underdeveloped, so the book manages to avoid hagiography. But on the whole, Kaufmann paints a sympathetic portrait of a philosopher who has been misunderstood, sometimes intentionally.

Kaufmann begins with Nietzsche’s early works, dealing with Greek history, and links it finally to his last writings, made in a frenzy before Nietzsche’s madness made him invalid. The major topics that Kaufmann focuses on are his break with Wagner, his theories of the Will to Power and the Übermensch, Eternal Recurrence, and his views on Jesus and Socrates.

The book links up his theories quite beautifully, and presents them in a thorough and down-to-earth manner. I was surprised at how much Nietzsche’s philosophy didn’t mesh with the “nihilistic” title he is so often tagged with. Though Kaufmann spends a good deal of time on Nietzsche’s polemics against anti-Semitism and German nationalism, more revelatory for me was how much of Nietzsche’s thought could be said to be metaphysical.