Books on the Bus

It was much closer than it should have been (because the cab I had ordered for the morning never showed up and the front desk had to order a gypsy cab at the last minute), but I did catch the bus back from Detroit.  I was glad to visit the DIA again after probably 25 years, but I don't think I'll go again, given how stressful it was visiting the city.  I'll write about the DIA later in the week.

I will say right up front, I didn't read nearly as much as I expected.  I had to tune into two different work calls, though I finally broke when we hit the border.  So that was close to 90 minutes I lost where I wasn't reading.  I was also alternating between John O'Hara's The Farmers Hotel (a very short novel) and Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante.  I guess neither of them were really amazing.  The plotting and dialogue in The Farmers Hotel felt pretty false to me.  But I really didn't care much for Wait Until Spring, Bandini.  I guess it is a minority position, but I find Arturo to be a very pathetic and actually repugnant character (maybe even a "deplorable" one).  It's one thing to be downtrodden (and yet still acting like life owes you something) but another altogether to take this out on women or to try to put other people down, which Arturo admits is his primary motivation (while at his job at the cannery).  In pretty much every book in the Quartet he ends up stealing money or jewelry from his mother and just in general acts like a shitheel and/or a pompous fool (the outsize self-importance without anything to back it up is so similar to Holden Caulfield plus Walter Mitty's dreaming).  He's particularly racist in The Road to Los Angeles (which I really hated) and fairly racist in Ask the Dust.  I suppose it doesn't matter that much, but his family situation and whether he has brothers or sisters is different in each book as well!  I really don't get the appeal of these novels.

At any rate, I managed to read the last page of The Road to Los Angeles as the bus pulled into the depot in Toronto.  I probably should just bail on the other two, but I guess I would just like to read them (as cult classics) and then get them out of the house, never to think of them again.  If I ever do read Catcher in the Rye, I must give myself permission to quit if the writing or more specifically Holden is annoying me, which I strongly suspect will be the case.

I don't have much more left on Madame Bovary, so I think I'll wrap that up next, then Ask the Dust, switch over to Angela Carter's Wise Children and then finally Dreams from Bunker Hill.  I wish it didn't feel quite so much like an obligation at this point.