This whole week is pretty much going to be overcast and fairly chilly. It may not actually rain all that much, though I did get sprinkled on a bit while biking home Monday. It's quite likely to rain tomorrow (Wed.) and Fri., so I'll be back on the TTC for those days. I'm still really quite gun-shy about riding when the streets are wet. I just don't need another crash, that's for sure. On a positive note, I basically don't notice any pain in my hands while riding, so that's a big improvement.
There's not really any point in getting into it, but I am in complete despair over the state of the world in general and the poor choices that the electorate has been making over and over, mostly in North America, but other places as well.
It's not really that big of an accomplishment, but I finally got through the published part of Musil's The Man Without Qualities. There are roughly 200 pages of essentially completed chapters, which he was reworking at the time of his death. That won't be so bad, but then there are 400 pages of just draft notes. I honestly don't know if I will truly read all this, or just skim it, or just skip it. At any rate, my impression of the novel has been declining a bit over these past weeks, and now it is more or less on par with Proust. There is certainly no way I would dream of rereading this, given that I am not getting that much out of it in the first place.
What is not just rare but unprecedented is that I have abandoned two other books in the same week! I was slowly making my way through The Boarding-House by William Trevor. He sets it up with quite a few quirky characters in the boarding house, but very quickly it becomes a test of wills between two unsavoury characters who inherit the boarding house and want to evict the other tenants. In this case, I was getting impatient, so, after about 50 pages, I turned to the good folks at Goodreads. While many did like it, many that felt that the former owner was acting out of some weird malice, since it was quite obvious what would happen after he turned over the boarding house. This just makes so little sense given his previous life's work in giving these lost souls refuge in the first place. It's sort of like he was an evil version of Prospero, but one that didn't have the guts or nerve to see all his bad plans come to fruition. So this was a major strike against it (since the owner was acting more like a convenient literary device and less like an actual person), but then reviewers said it was like a dark Ealing comedy, waiting for these two to get their comeuppance. Frankly, I have better things to do than wait around for unpleasant characters to get their comeuppance (and I really could hardly bear to read about the doings of the petty thief & grifter, Mr. Studdy). I strongly disliked Trevor's Nights at the Alexandria as well, so I do wonder if I am just not receptive to him. At some point I will dive into his short stories, but I am more than willing to part with them if it turns out I am not digging them either.
I didn't even wait as long to abandon Mitzi Bytes by Kerry Clare. I saw her give a short reading and interview at the library, so I was sort of primed to enjoy this book, but I just found it over-written and a bit repetitive. In addition, it is so hard for me to be interested in 1) Mommy blogs or 2) what happens when someone's secret on-line identity is compromised. This was leaving me completely cold, and I stopped around page 30. I just look around at the hundreds of books I still want to read and think almost every one of these has to be better than this... I think I'll switch over to Bellow's Ravelstein for my new gym book. It's certainly better written to be sure. I guess my main hope is that my spirits will perk up a bit next week if we get better weather. I'm also hoping to come across more books that I actually enjoy. I may literally only have encountered two or perhaps three for the entire year, depending on how I count Montaigne, and the rest I've just sort of dragged myself to the finish line!
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