KO!

Did indeed devour the new installment of Knausgaard this week. I am addicted to these books. This one is very funny and also cringe-inducingly awful, as indeed adolescence itself is cringe-inducingly awful. A good interview with Don Bartlett about translating Knausgaard.

"Infuriating; possibly illuminating"

Shades of my relationship with Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels!

Closing tabs

Ayn Rand, cat fancier.

Vanilla is the old black.

Rebecca Traister on the violence of adolescent girls. (Joyce Carol Oates and Megan Abbott are two great novelists on this theme - I am much looking forward to Megan's new novel The Fever.)

This is interesting. (Via GeekPress.)

Have been doing some very interesting reading this week, about which more anon, and am more strongly resolved than ever to stop rotting my brain with so much junk! I am not contemplating denying myself light reading altogether, that would be simply penitential, but I would guess only about a third of the novels I read are things I am really avid for, the others are just to fill up the time. More nonfiction for the rest of the year, and I have some research topics I'm excited to begin reading in more deeply, so that's perfect.

(I think this disgust was particularly prompted by two poor books I read last week. Usually I link to bad books without naming them - I have a protective feeling that minor authors of minor books should not have to read me saying cruel things about their novels in the first page of Google results! But these two were ones by high-profile authors that inevitably have a lot of buzz, so my scruples in that case do not apply - instead I think I am doing a bit of public service in warning others about their demerits....)

I have let it go too long without logging light reading - it becomes a pain when I have to paste in a ton of links!

First of all, and very good (though I find the spin put on things at the end quite bizarre), Jo Walton's My Real Children, which among other things confirms my suspicion that the novel as a genre is built upon a scaffolding of counterfactuals!

A reread of Dorothy Dunnett's first Lymond book, but I am not sure I am really in the mood for this (I like having a long series on the go in a month when I am spending time in airports - started the second one but have left it idle for now).

Deborah Coates's Strange Country, which is frustratingly slow in opening (as if you set Alice Munro to rewrite the first half of a Lee Child thriller!) but picks up speed to become one of my very favorite kinds of novel. The writing is really exceptionally good, and the characters are very appealing, though I wish she were getting more crime-series-type editing (I don't know that you would enjoy this without having read the first couple in the series, whereas I think some editing ought to have made it into a more satisfying book in its own right).

Now the two really poor ones.

First of all, Mo Hayder's preposterous Wolf. The violence in her books has always been polarizing, and they are also uneven in quality, but the best couple are in my view superb. This one is terrible! The writing is still quite good, and I can't fault it for readability, but the central drama (with ridiculous twist at the end) hinges on a family who are being kept hostage and the detective trying to figure out who they are (and as a consequence where they can be found and rescued), with chapters alternating between the hostage scenes and the detective's quest to identify them. But in fact the information he has plus five minutes with Google would have answered this question immediately!

Then Greg Iles' Natchez Burning, which is particularly cartoonishly written in its sequences set in the past and which more generally just reminded me of the dreadful John Grisham at his most portentous on the topic of race relations in the South (A Time to Kill is possibly one of the most banal and silly books I have ever read). It's marketed as the first in a trilogy, but really we are supposed to know the characters from a prior series of books that I hadn't read - hadn't read and don't intend to! I really, really didn't like this one, though it is competent enough that I read it to the end rather than putting it aside. In fact I dimly recall that I have read one or two others by this author and didn't like them either - this one is a mass of good intentions but didn't work for me.

Finally, Mary Rickert's The Memory Garden, which I wasn't keen on at first but which grew on me as I read further. The first half is dreadfully whimsical, but it becomes much more satisfying as the engagements with the past grow more substantive.

Halfway through Knausgaard volume 3 and very happy to have temporarily arrested the brain rot!

"What would Bowie do?"

Boy George's life soundtrack. I have never had a strong relationship with the Boy George oeuvre, but it is a great list!

(I saw Taboo with G. when it was on Broadway some years ago; it was surprisingly enjoyable. I have one semi-sentimental association with Boy George: the summer I turned thirteen I did a ton of babysitting, due to a good arrangement made with my mother. I was already taking lessons on two musical instruments, clarinet and recorder, but I felt that I would die if I could not learn to play the oboe as well [I'd always had a longing for it, but some off-the-books bassoon lessons from a visiting Scottish exchange student had further whetted my appetite], and she made a deal with me that if I made enough money to buy the instrument, she would pay for the lessons! We found an oboe for $125 and it cost about $125 more for repairs, which she generously paid as well; things were cheaper in those days, but on the other hand babysitting in that time and place only paid $2/hr., so it took quite a lot of hours regardless. My main babysitting gig was 9-1 four or so days a week for 2 endearing but tiring hellions; their favorite game was to pretend that they were Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe and whack each other with tennis rackets. I did babysit them fairly regularly in the evening as well, and when I was putting them to bed, we always listened to one of the two cassettes they possessed: Michael Jackson's Thriller or Culture Club's Colour By Numbers. 1984 in a nutshell.)

The American Boy

Thanks to a tip from Robert Hudson, I just read an amazing essay by Daniel Mendelsohn about his adolescent correspondence with Mary Renault. Subscriber-only, but get hold of it yourself if you ever had a thing for Renault's books (I was obsessed with them from about age 10 to 15, and they bear up wonderfully well to present-day rereading)....

The science-fictional guide to adolescencce

At the LRB, Stephen Burt on Jo Walton's Among Others, a novel I also very wholeheartedly recommend.

"The 'cool' space of numbered propositions"

At the New Haven Review, Stephen Burt on growing up between genders. 

Souvenirs

Paul Fussell has died.  I can't remember exactly when I first read his books, only that a copy of the subfustian-jacketed Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (it does not at all look as though it would be an exciting book, only to me at the time it was thrilling!) probably came my way when I was fourteen or fifteen via my inspired teacher Deborah Dempsey.  I acquired and read The Great War and Modern Memory not long after that, and it was an eye-opener; I had read a good deal of the WWI poetry Fussell writes about already, and some of the memoirs (Robert Graves, Vera Brittain), but the kind of analysis the book does made me think I want to write a book like this! 

Two bits that have stayed with me, possibly inaccurately: his observation in passing that before the aftermath of WWI, with British soldiers returning from having spent years in France, the thing you might buy on holiday to remember your trip by was called a keepsake rather than a souvenir; and his reproduction of the text of the amazingly Orwellian form postcard given to soldiers on the front to send home.

Silver linings

At the Times, William Gibson on the all-seeing Google (hmmm, I am eager for a copy of his new novel)...

Monosyllabic puberty

John Crace on how Dick Francis's books helped him survive his adolescence. (Alison Flood calls the Francis corpus "chick lit for men.")

I have been haunted all week by the conviction that I must come up with a concept that will let me seamlessly execute Franciscan thrillers on an annual basis...

"I am a teenage elf"

"If someone told me about it now, I would probably think it's incredibly nerdy, but once you go out into the forest and get to hit monsters with a latex sword, there's no going back."

The light and the dark

Recent bits at the LRB by Colm Tóibín and Jenny Diski.

X

Deborah Eisenberg has a lovely piece in the latest issue of the NYRB on the first volume of Susan Sontag's letters and journals, edited by her son David Rieff. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's a nice bit:

It must always be fascinating to observe a child going about unwrapping the package that is herself and starting to inventory the contents. And how much more fascinating it is when the child is able to chronicle the process and the contents themselves are fascinating! Not that Sontag's rhapsodizing or her disdain are remarkable in a fifteen-year-old, and neither, particularly, are the objects of her rhapsodizing and disdain; this was a period during which it was fashionable among certain adolescents to read serious literature and listen to serious music, and adolescents of many periods have considered their parents to be morons. And Sontag's intellectual precocity, though striking, is hardly peerless—just think of the age Mozart was when he was writing some of the music she listens to with such discrimination!

Very startling, though, is her unhesitating sense of purpose—the sense that she is an acolyte, engaged in some devotional practice, continuously purifying herself in preparation for a predetermined destiny that she has yet to fully understand. Naturally, we in the future happen to know that the child whose diary we're reading is to become Susan Sontag, but oddly enough, so, it seems, does she.

There is a short passage by Wittgenstein that this reminds me of, but I cannot lay hands on the book - I will poke around at the office tomorrow and see if I can find it there (I think I have two copies and that they are both at the office!)...