Fractions

It has been an extremely busy week, and I haven't yet started my end-of-semester grading, though I think it shouldn't take too long. It will be the middle of next week at the earliest, I would guess, before I can do any of my own work.

Have had some pleasurable distractions in spite of pressures of work. On Monday night, saw my friend Elliot Thomson's little gem of a comedy (he and actor Peter Hirsch call it his "Faberge egg roll"), Le Refuge.

Last night I met up with G. for the highly enjoyable Le Jazz Hot. The documentary joining-together bits are a little amateurish, though the footage is interesting, but the musicians are superb: I would definitely go and see them again. (The Anderson brothers are twins, and I was strongly reminded of my own twin brothers by the way each referred to the other as "my brother"!) Extremely delicious dinner afterwards at Bottega del Vino; I had beef carpaccio and spinach gnocchi before confirming my previous impression that this restaurant serves the best tiramisu in New York.

Closing tabs:

Colin Wilson is dead. Ritual in the Dark is more an artifact of its time than a great novel, I think, but it's a fascinating phenomenon, that mid-century period of British occultism. You get a bit of it in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography - I don't think there's a Wilson biography, but there should be.

Teju Cole on truth and reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere.

Light reading around the edges: several more Eva Ibbotson comfort re-reads; Charlie Williams' excellently titled Love Will Tear Us Apart; Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt (the plot is too intricate and the characters too shallow, but fairly readable regardless); Paul Cornell's London Falling, which is so exactly the sort of book that I like to read that I fell into a psychological slump when I came to the end and realized the next installment hasn't yet been published; and Laini Taylor's really delightful novella Night of Cake and Puppets (more books should have the word "cake" in their titles). I am contemplating a resolution for 2014 to read more nonfiction - one does occasionally, especially when reading something like the Connelly, get the feeling that the brain will rot on a diet of so much pap - but I would have to reserve the right to consume a good deal of light reading regardless, perhaps just not the fodder-level books.

The short list

For every author who ever lost a moment's peace of mind over an Amazon review!

Catch-up

I am safely home in New York, though so tired that I am eying the time and wondering whether I might possibly go to bed pretty much now!

That said, the JetBlue flight gets me home at a much more humane time than the Cayman Airways one - I was here before 5, not at all bad. Very happy to see little cat Mickey and also to find three finished copies of the novel.

Which also has its first post-publication review - Charles McNulty at the LA Times!

Someone who liked it less (I just saw this one last night, though I think it may have been up for a while): Walter Biggins at Bookslut.

In more alarming news, I think my Kindle is on the verge of giving up the ghost. I kept on having to reboot it last night and today on the plane, so that finally I had to give in and read my backup "real" book instead: Leonard Marcus's Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices. I thought Katharine Weber's piece was one of the most moving in the entire collection, but I was very glad that the cooler and more critical essay by Christine Jenkins was included: the two most serious criticisms I have of L'Engle's writing concern (a) the intolerable smugness of many of the characters we are supposed to like and admire (when I was a child, I did not understand why my mother was not as enthusiastic as I was about L'Engle's books, but I think in retrospect this must have been at the root of it!); and (b) the distressing homophobia in novels like A House Like a Lotus and A Severed Wasp, and Jenkins is very good on both these counts. I think that I would have worshiped Madeleine L'Engle if I had met her between the ages of ten and fifteen, but that I would not have liked her very much at all if I had only encountered her in adulthood: there are some very unattractive elements mixed up with the parts that people rightly found so compelling. Cynthia Zarin's controversial New Yorker profile of 2004 is available online for free in its entirety.

Aside from the usual minutiae (it is difficult to explain how much time I seem to spend thinking about when I am going to get to the allergy doctor's office for my shots!), I really need to get down to business tomorrow morning and finish a good final version of this particular detail essay. I would like to send it out on Monday or Tuesday, and I also still need to write my paper for the ASECS conference in Cleveland next week: I am arguing against the utility of the term "experimental" to describe any eighteenth-century fiction, and then turning around and saying that if we do want to keep it, it fits Richardson's method better than Sterne's. Looking forward to lively conversation on this count and others!

Light reading around the edges: I love Charlie Williams' Mangel series more than almost anything else I can think of, and the latest installment Made of Stone is truly a gem - possibly my favorite one yet. I also greatly enjoyed Bridget Clerkin's Kindle Single Monster.

Bonus link: Jenny Diski on Buzz Bissinger and the shopping business.

I have ordered a new Kindle Paperwhite, but it probably won't arrive till Monday. I hope this current device will last until then. It is very good for all sorts of novel-reading, but particularly invaluable when I want to run down to Chelsea Piers with a tiny trail backpack containing a change of clothes, wallet, keys, asthma inhaler and reading material for lunch and subway home! I do have the Kindle app on my phone, I guess I could fall back on that if I have to....

More tabs

Fiendishly busy through the end of next week, and a little worried about snowballing March commitments also - but it's only two and a half weeks from now until spring break, at which point I will dig my head down hard into novel revisions...

A great profile of Vanessa Veselka.

A feast of sounds at the British Library.

Dave Lull kindly forwarded Tom Shippey's amusing 1982 review of Martin Amis and others on videogames.

On Friday night (I'm giving a talk in Boston on Thursday) I am going to stay with a dear old friend and see this production of one of my favorite plays!

Have hardly even had any time to read a novel, too much other work and other reading, though I did reread Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass on Friday night as most soothing available option and also, on the subway, Charlie Williams's appealing latest installment of bouncer noir, Graven Image.

Light reading catch-up

It was a strangely good week for new books (conventionally they still seem to be published on a Tuesday, which was the old-school tradition). If you pre-order for Kindle, they then appear as if by magic when the official publication date arrives, and I was delighted to devour Charlie Williams' latest installment of the Royston Blake saga, One Dead Hen (if you've been reading here for a while, you already know that I think Charlie is one of literature's great unsung geniuses of the comic first-person voice - this book is great, but start at the beginning of the epic with Deadfolk - it's like reading Proust, the volumes are self-standing but there's no reason not to start at the beginning!); Lev Grossman's The Magician King (excellent, and definitely up to the high standard set by the previous installment - I was initially mildly skeptical, I have perhaps read "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" too many times myself, but was completely won over by about 10% in, and particularly enjoyed the narration of Julia's backstory); and David Liss's The Twelfth Enchantment, an Austen homage of sorts with something of the feel of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - I especially liked how it came alive when the characters talked about the balance of European trade and mechanization, the Luddite plot is inspired!

All of these books were highly absorbing - as I say, it was a very good week for new releases - but perhaps the book that most deeply transported me was an advance copy I obtained via the interesting new service Netgalley, which provides digital galleys to potential reviewers in a variety of formats. It is Deon Meyer's Trackers, and it is absolutely superb. It features several characters from previous books, but I don't think you'd need to have read them in order to immerse yourself in this one; it has an unorthodox structure, to the extent that I slightly started to worry about three-quarters of the way through that a different book had somehow been spliced into my electronic copy, but it all comes together beautifully in the end. If you enjoy crime fiction and aren't yet reading Meyer's books, this is a situation to remedy as soon as possible: he's incredibly good, I just looked through the Amazon listings to see if there was one I'd particularly recommend but really you can't go wrong.

I also read and enjoyed another Netgalley book, Kyle Garlett's inspiring and moving Heart of Iron: My Journey from Transplant Patient to Ironman Triathlete, but that will be more appropriately reviewed at my other blog!

Finally, I am relieved to report that Stephen Knight's vampire book seems to me significantly better than his zombie one, though still rather too much weaponry and firepower for my tastes (it is the same sort of disproportion, compared to the usual thrillers I read, as one finds with paranormal romance when it comes to sex: it is perplexing to encounter these very full descriptions of acts and details that are conventionally minimized or excluded!).

Gravity's Rainbow is mesmerizing: I'm about halfway through, will go back to that now I think...

Of cake-holes and cracking birds

Charlie Williams' novels about unhinged nightclub doorman Royston Blake are some of my absolute favorites; the first three are being reissued in the next few months, and a fourth will appear in August (it has the excellent title One Dead Hen). These novels are true classics of dark comic noir; "Blakey" has the same sort of life off the page that Harold Bloom attributes to Shakespearean characters like Falstaff and Cleopatra!

Blakey has been on a blogging spree recently, and when I suggested to Charlie that perhaps a guest post for Light Reading would be in order, he was happy to serve as middleman...

ROYSTON BLAKE'S TOP TEN LITERARY PICKS

Mangel Informer
I were in a lock-in down the Volley once when Filthy Stan the motor man suggested I can't read. To prove how wrong he were, I picked up a copy of the Mangel Informer, the premier news wossname in our town, and started reading the top story out loud. "MAN GETS NOSE BUST," I shouted, starting with the headline. You gotta shout it so they knows it's in big letters that are capital. "Filthy Stan the motor man, a stumpy little cunt from Norbert Green who has got hair so greasy he can fry his breakfast in it on a warm day, got his nose bust in the Volley last night. There was no witnesses and the whole thing were an accident caused by not thinking things through before he opens his cake-hole. In future, he ought to be more careful." I put down the paper and gave Stan a look that asked him if he had any comeback. The answer were no, I reckon, cos he turned arse and pegged it for the exit. Only it were a lock-in, like I says, and he bounced off the door and fell on his arse, clutching his hooter that were dripping red.

Penthouse
If you're looking for a grot mag, you can't get no better than Penthouse. I found this particular copy in a skip when I were about 5, and it's followed us everywhere since then. Which ain't actually that far, being as I still lives in the same house I growed up in. Same bedroom and all, although I moved my old man's double bed in there after he carked it so I can stretch out and shag birds. But I still got that old Penthouse under the mattress for when I can't pull.

Rocky vs Clubber Lang
This is my favourite book. It is about how the famous heavyweight boxer Rocky Balboa has to fight Clubber Lang, played by B.A. Baracus from the A-Team, after B.A. kills Mickey the coach by shouting at Rocky. This book were so successful they made a film of it, and that also starred B.A. Baracus as Clubber Lang. I reckon it's important that they keeps the same actors when they turns a book into a film, else it'll confuse intelligent folks like meself who read it as a book first.

First Blood
This is the opposite of Rocky vs Clubber, cos they turned it into a book after they done the film first, getting some called David Morris to do it (I ain't sure about that last name cos a bit of the cover's gone). Personally I reckon he had a piss easy job, this Morris feller, cos all he had to do were watch the fucking film and write down what happens. And he couldn't even do that right cos he's got Rambo dying in the end, which he don't in the film. What I reckon is that he fell akip before the film finished, and had to guess what happened. But you fucked up, didn't you, Dave? That's why they never came back to you for Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Quay's Catalogue
I've had this one since being a youngun. You don't see catalogues much no more but everyone used to have em in them days, and you could buy anything from them, even boring shite like ironing boards. But the best bit were the lingerie section. I never found out what lingerie is, but I didn't really care - the whole section were full of birds wearing hardly nothing at all. And we're talking cracking looking birds here. Even the older ones are well fit, in their cross-your-heart bras that you could lug a couple of frozen turkeys in if you had a mind to. But it's one in particular that caught my eye, from the age of five right up to now, with me taking it down every now and then for another peep at her. She's fucking beautiful, I swear, and yet everything about her is wrong. Dark brown hair, normal size tits, pale skin... but there's a look on her face that says she's been waiting all her life to put this bra and knickers on and have me look at her, and that she's held out for me. I always wondered if one day I might find her. I'd ask her out and bring her some flowers and take her down by the river for a picnic. Then I'd find a quiet spot and pull her dress off, her looking at us the whole while like this is all that ever mattered. But I wouldn't take her knickers and bra off - no way. To do that would be to destroy her purity. I'd just yank the gusset aside.

Ford Capri Haynes guide
Anyone with a motor needs a book on how to strip her down and fix her. I found this one in the boot when I first got my Capri, which were a 2.8i model in gold with a black vinyl roof. Mind you, I reckon they got the pages mixed up or summat, cos I can't make tail nor arse of it.

The Bitch - Jackie Collins
This were my mam's book, and I keeps it there on the shelf so I can remember her by it. She died when I were a youngun, but sometimes she comes to me in my dreams and says she's left a load of letters to me and hid em somewhere no one will look except me. But I've searched everywhere and I can't fucking find em. I ain't giving up, mind. I'll be looking for them letters until the day I carks it. I reckon they might be in the cellar or summat.

Knight Rider Goes to Hazzard County
This were my favourite book as a youngun, but I seem to have lost the pages and I just got the cover now. I went to have a read of it the other day and when I opened it a load of old folded up bits of letter-writing paper fell out, which I chucked in the bin. Fucking vandal, whoever done that.

The Magus - John Fowles
I chanced upon this book when I were about ten. We used to have a bookshop in town in them days, and I were knocking about around the High street with Legsy and Fin when we decided to have a gander in it. Thing was, all the other shops was on the look-out just then, so you had nowhere you could hone your shoplifting technique without fear of getting caught and the coppers brung in, which wastes your whole afternoon. One look in the bookshop and we knowed it were the place - there were some speccy bird behind the counter and no fucker else. So Fin steps up first, swipes a book off the side and slies it down the front of his trolleys, thereby contaminating it with his unwashed regions but it don't matter cos no one's gonna read the fucking thing anyhow. He's going for the door, pretending to look at some postcards or summat on the way, and the speccy bird stands up and blows a whistle, pointing at Fin like he's got the lurgey (which he has, like as not). Next thing we knows, and while we're still trying to suss out what's taking place here, a massive baldy bloke with a beard hares out from the back and starts eyeballing us, fists clenched like swollen pig hearts. He follows the bird's pointy finger to Fin and goes for him, grabbing him by the elbow before Fin, twat like he is, could piss off out the door. So I picked up the nearest, fattest book I could find and used it to pummel the beardy bloke's head a few times until he let Fin go and we was all happy. That book were The Magus by John Fowles, or someone.

Deadfolk - me (but typed up by Charlie Williams)
This is the one the Writer is meant to have typed out and got turned into a book. Personally I ain't ever seen a copy, so I dunno if it's true or not, but I can vouch for the words in it so long as he wrote em down just the way I telled em. Every one of them words is true, I fucking swears it. Even the lies is true, and there ain't none of them at all. In case you're wondering, Deadfolk is about me - Royston Blake, being head doorman of Hoppers Wine Bar & Bistro (as the new owner insisted on calling it). It's about how I came to have a joint stake in that operation, and features a lot of cunts who was trying to stop us and besmirch my name. You can't have that, cunts besmirching your name. When that happens, the only thing you can do is try to smirch em back, and this here book is about how I done that. There's also a bit about Rocky III in it.

Homecoming linkage

Very relieved to be back in one place (Cayman).

The lung ailment is finally on the wane - my mother handed me last Wednesday in Philadelphia a bottle of the disgustingly titled and disgustingly effective Mucinex, and I am continuing to pop the tabs twice daily in hopes of banishing the last of the EVIL PHLEGM from my airways. I might even go for a short easy swim later, though really I will wait for tomorrow to return to exercise (I'm still coughing quite a bit) - it has been a horrible three-week exercise deprivation, with high costs for my morale and mental health as well as for my physical fitness...

Miscellaneous linkage:

At the Washington Post, Monica Hesse on Laura Hillenbrand's ongoing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome (read this piece if you are, like me, a writer feeling unduly sorry for yourself and full of self-dislike at not having written enough recently!).

How Charlie Williams' insanely good Royston Blake novels came to see the light of day.

The maraschino cherry bee crisis!

More Invisible Things reviews: ReaderGirls; The Hiding Spot; Book Chic. And another reader starts (sensibly!) with The Explosionist (alas, something that I could do nothing about is that the cover of Invisible Things pretty much completely omits the fact that it is a sequel - I made sure to do what I could do make the novel a free-standing self-sufficient narrative, but I think it is a pity not to read the earlier book first, in fact really they are probably best thought of as one long continuous narrative).

As this post has unduly elongated itself, I think I will put the light reading catch-up in a separate post. I've also just spent an hour looking through this year's blog for a "my year in reading" post for a literary blog I admire - interesting to contemplate, though counterintuitive to write it in November, as I will hope to have a good month of reading still to come...

Stopping warlocks

At the LA Times, Ed Park asks Lev Grossman how he came to write his new novel The Magicians.

Also: the genesis of Charlie Williams' Stairway to Hell! (Worth going and reading if you have a fondness for secret histories, even if you do not plan to read the novel - though you should!)

Light reading catch-up

I was saving up some especially good light reading for my plane trip a week ago and initial days of tropical idyll (which is really partly a work trip, but includes a vacation module), so I have a more than usually excellent pile of books to report on, including a pair of books (one a re-read, one that I haven't yet finished) which deserve their own post and a wonderful book on running that I think I will also write about separately.

It took considerable self-restraint not to pounce on The Girl Who Played With Fire the moment it arrived from Amazon, but fortunately I was so busy with novel-revising that I literally had no time to read it - it was a delightful way to pass the flight, and I think that if anything it is even more compulsively readable than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I think it is more wish-fulfillment than actual similarity, but I strongly identify with the semi-feral female heroine in the model of Lisbeth Salander - the crime-fiction prototype for this sort of character is Carol O'Connell's Mallory, but one also finds a version of the type in Smilla's Sense of Snow, and gentler incarnations in my favorite Peter Dickinson novel (The Lively Dead) and in some of Iain non-M. Banks's female protagonists (Whit, The Business). Bonus link: the Literary Saloon reflects on the quite different titles chosen for the translations of Stieg Larsson into various languages.

As soon as I read Jo Walton's recommendation at the Tor website for The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History, I knew I had to get it! I absolutely loved it, and only regret that I cannot offer it to my twelve-year-old self, who as a passionate devotee of historical fiction (Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Anya Seton) and a lover of Richard III (Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, Shakespeare) and an obsessive reader of books set in Roman Britain and/or Arthurian spinoffs (Rosemary Sutcliffe, Gillian Bradshaw, Mary Stewart) would have found this an utterly magical read when it was originally published in 1983. The opening sentences still sent a thrill through my heart:

The road the Romans made traversed North Wales a little way inland, between the weather off the Irish Sea and the mountains of Gwynedd and Powys; past the copper and the lead that the travel-hungry Empire craved. The road crossed the Conwy at Caerhun, the Clwyd at Asaph sacred to Esus, and the Roman engineers passed it through the hills, above the shore and below the peaks, never penetrating the spine of the country. Which is not to say that there were no ways in; only that the Romans did not find them.

It is a strange and elliptical and wonderful book; the two are not at all alike, but I would compare it to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin in terms of its power simultaneously to call up my childhood self and still enchant my adult one.

And then another treat: Charlie Williams' Stairway to Hell. There is a special place in my heart that will be forever reserved for the exploits of Royston Blake, but this is a very unusual and appealing novel (and could be well paired with Lewis Shiner's Glimpses and George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag on a rock-and-roll fantasy syllabus - if they ever make a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, let Charlie be the screenwriter, please!).

"Gosh, I could do with a bathe"

At the Guardian, John Mullan lists ten of the best literary swimming scenes!

(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)

In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...

(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)

(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)