Bookish News

It definitely took longer than I expected, even with the weird breaks between shows at the Fringe, but I finally got through Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. All I can say is my reading tastes and outlook have changed radically since I was in my 20s. Back then I thought Augie March was the bees' knees, and I highly recommended it. This time around, I found it so ponderous and slow and very boring and just unpleasant in many sections, particularly anytime Augie's boorish brother Simon was on stage. Maybe things would have been different if I was reading large chunks at a time and finished it in a week or so (like I used to do), but I somehow doubt it. I will say the last line of the book is a killer: "Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America." And this paragraph near the end is also pretty good: "She {Stella} doesn’t have any terrific talent for acting, but that’s how it appears to go. People don’t do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they’re good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else."

Obviously I didn't want to hang onto the book after such a disappointing repeat performance, so it is currently sitting out in front in the Little Free Library.  (No takers so far...)  I found that I drastically downgraded Powers's Morte d'Urban as well.  While I still liked the beginning of Bell's Waiting for the End of the World, I couldn't swallow the ending this time around (reminded me too much of Hitchcock's Rope, which I loathe because of the inconsistency of the main character).  

Another book I managed to finish while at the Fringe was Red Hot City, which is an urban studies book about Atlanta and the various missteps (some more intentional than others) that led to massive gentrification in Atlanta and generally pushing the poor out into the suburbs, which were even less prepared to meet the needs of this population.  It's depressing stuff, particularly now that we are what Marx would call an era of late capitalism.  I generally do try to read a non-fiction book at work, and I have decided that the next one will be Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.

I'm just launching into Desani's All About H. Hatterr.  It's something different all right.  I'm not sure it's a book I'd read more than once.  I'm not sure if I can explain it, but it seems to be about a Eurasian boy who is orphaned early on and ends up in India.  His use of English, as he recounts his life story, is very loose indeed.

I finished Reuss's Henry of Atlantic City.  This was a more interesting book, to me, than Horace Afoot.  In both cases, it seems like Reuss is taking some bit of esoteric knowledge he has (Roman philosophy or gnostic teachings) and building a novel around it.  Henry has photographic recall, and he seems fairly autistic.  (This book came out a few years before The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night but has some fairly interesting parallels.)  Given how much he talks about angels whispering to him, I suspect he is meant to be schizophrenic as well.  A very heavy burden for this boy, who has a very unreliable father, and most of his other adult role models are in the casino business or in the mob or both.  There are a few loose ends not tied up at the end, and it really isn't clear how Henry will make out with his new guardian at the end of the novel.

I'm actually reading a bit more science fiction/fantasy, which I return to every few years.  I'm rereading Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and toying with rereading the Elric Saga.  I suspect Elric won't hold up nearly as well as when I read it during my years of teenaged angst.  Perhaps I'll find out. 

Aside from that there are short stories to read.  Mavis Gallant's Varieties of Exile and stories by Alice Munro and Ellen Gilchrist and perhaps Joy Williams as well.

I was supposed to pick up the LOA edition of James Baldwin's Later Novels, but I missed out by less than a week of someone snatching it up first.  That's annoying.  I have the LOA edition of his Collected Essays, and I recently ordered (Early) Novels and Stories (to replace a copy that got mold damaged!), though I suspect the seller will cancel when he realizes just how much shipping to Canada is.  We'll see I guess.

Just in general, I think I'll finally have better momentum as almost all the books I am reading for the foreseeable future are shortish with the exception of Perec's Life: A User's Manual and Austen's Mansfield Park, which I might end up reading on the train to Ottawa, or the bus to Detroit for that matter.