The Big Book Project

The Part About the Blog

2009-10-24T15:29:00.006-04:00

Another free "first reads" book; another unfocused, multi-sentence review. This time it's Roberto Bolaño's 893-page murder epic 2666.

There's probably no way I would have read this book had it not been mailed to my house free of charge. I'd passed it over at the library and half-heartedly listened to or read others' thoughts. I'd been turned off by the cavalier poets of The Savage Detectives and dry, repetitive "humor" of Nazi Literature in the Americas. It seemed to me Bolaño treated literature like some bad ass X-Games sport, which, as much as I love it, it ain't. (Incidentally, neither is cooking, sorry Bobby Flay and Anthony Bourdain).

Here, despite the book's length, Bolaño has dialed back the things that annoyed me (or at least split them up and distributed them amongst a greater number of characters). The first book focused on obsession and passion as the 4 critics pursued, as academics do, the creative spirit in the least creative of ways. From there 2666 spirals into an exploration of madness (Amalfitano), anchorless paranoia (Fate's trip an aimless binge in Santa Teresa), and eventually death ("The Part About the Crimes"). In those areas, 2666 seemed like a more serious Mexican cousin of Gravity 's Rainbow, with some of the lawless dread of Oakley Hall's Warlock or the show Deadwood. The fifth book ended well but I thought that going back to WWII to start was too much of a reset and some of the life stories of people Archimboldi encountered reminded me of the parts of Bolaño books I don't like.

Bolaño, like Jonathan Lethem, is able to make his fictional artists seem familiar and also fits in some shout-outs to his favorites (here: David Lynch and Marcel Duchamp).

I suspect a little bit of the overwhelming praise of this book is due to the Entourage/30 Rock effect (critics/industry folk like things that explore their own world), and "the Part About the Critics" and the mystical "Archimboldi" himself definitely feed that, but there's plenty to enjoy here. Good work dead guy.

Photo Finish

2009-10-10T11:03:00.008-04:00

I'm too lazy to write up my notes on McEllroy's Women and Men. I finished it in early September and haven't been able to think of anything to say. Plus I didn't really like it so here's a picture of my thoughts on a post(modern)-it.

I was motivated enough to pile up the books and pose for a photograph before going out to dinner (to celebrate my birthday; not my reading accomplishments).

Now I'm gonna relax so I don't succumb to a rap attack:

USA USA USA!

2009-08-13T19:00:00.006-04:00

John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy proved a pretty quick big read once you get used to the different narrative elements he uses (3 or 4 plane rides/plenty of airport and hotel time also help).

I'm not sure I liked it (them?) as much as Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer which was able to fit in a lot of the same themes into one volume with less characters, while admittedly only really focusing on NYC. Parts were amazing: Mac in The 42nd Parallel was an interesting Ulysses Everett McGill-type, the "all is lost" Camera Eye (50) section gave context to labor struggles of the time, and the biographical section on the Unknown Soldier was the strongest of the many biographies of contemporary figures including Edison, T. Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Woodrow Wilson and others. The main sections that focused on different character studies were distinct until about halfway through 1919 (the book and, i guess, the year) when the characters voices got a little too similar and just started to serve as surrogates to experience the events of the early 20th Century. That being said, the trilogy does lead the reader through the major events of the American 20th Century, including enough labor issues to make Howard Zinn proud.

So of course that means only one more book, Joseph McEllroy's Women & Men, which according to this post on the excellent LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy, is one and a half times as long as War & Peace. Shit.

Mason & Dixon & Update

2009-08-09T15:58:00.009-04:00

Most recently read and most impossible to summarize, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Structurally it's similar to Barth's Sot-Weed Factor in that it's a post-modern novel written in an 18th century style. Pynchon went all out with random capitalization and olde-tyme spellings. Overall, it's a good book about friendship through shared circumstances, but it shines in its craziness. The book includes a talking dog and a mechanical duck that carries grudges. It also includes these two ridiculous anachronisms:

- An Englishman, just returned from a trip to Italy is eager to introduce his pubmates to a fantastic new dish he discovered there (pizza). Unable to find dough, tomato and cheese, they made do with stilton cheese, anchovies, and "ketjup," on a loaf of brown bread. Que delicioso!

- Friggin' Popeye: "That is, 'I am that which I am,' " helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.

Pynchon continues his infatuation with silly names for the non-historically accurate characters, particularly the narrator Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. Also, I bet you didn't know George Washington had a black, Jewish slave chef. I liked the book and there's a lot more where that came from but my brain has been taxed enough already. I'm gonna go read some Calvin & Hobbes.

I'm almost done so here's an update to make this post look longer:
~~Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1,079p)~~ 1.14.09
~~The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (721p)~~ 1.26.09
~~A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (729p)~~ 2.3.09
~~Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike (1,516p)~~ 2.16.09
~~Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (776p)~~ 3.7.09
~~Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (704p)~~ 3.14.09
~~The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1056p)~~ 3.22.09
~~Ulysses by James Joyce (768p)~~ 3.29.09
~~The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (720p)~~ 4.5.09
~~The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (819p)~~ 4.18.09
~~The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz (992p)~~ 5.2.09
~~The Early Stories: 1953-1975 by John Updike (864p)~~ 5.3.09
~~The Complete Novels (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) by Flann O'Brien (787p)~~ 5.19.09
~~Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (853p)~~ 6.3.09
~~The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956p)~~ 6.24.09
~~The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (706p)~~ 7.8.09
~~Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773p)~~ 7.23.09
The USA Trilogy (~~The 42nd Parallel~~ 8.5.09, 1919, and The Big Money) by John Dos Passos (1,144p in 3 volumes)
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy (1192p)

"You've Always Been the Caretaker"

2009-08-08T15:20:00.000-04:00

Next up was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It was an interesting spin on the standard bildungsroman where instead of traveling to have the world of culture, art, and philosophy revealed to him, Hans Castorp stays in one place and has all of WWI Europe visit. He's the same kind of naive weiner as Philip Carey and Augie March, but Thomas Mann seems to be having more fun with him. From the moment of his arrival at the sanatorium to visit his cousin, Mann puts Castorp in a Catch-22-like paradox where he must prove his wellness to leave, then eventually demands to stay once he's well enough to go. As the situation goes on and on it becomes less funny and takes on more of a creepy, Shining-like inevitable trap where the passage of time gets blurrier and blurrier. Thankfully Castrop alternates between the old fashioned young dope extremes of unjustified indignation and cockeyed optimism, keeping most of the 700 pages fairly fun.

There are a ton of symbolic characters in the book (more than half of which sailed over my post-war head). My favorites were the ever arguing and politically opposed duo of Settembrini and Naphta who I took to be early 20th Century representations of Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken:

Two loudmouths who really can't live without each other. A love story as old as time itself...

The Missing Link

2009-08-07T14:36:00.000-04:00

I'm playing a little bit of catch-up here and writing about a few books from the project that I finished almost two months ago. First up, William Gaddis' The Recognitions.

It's an Encino Man-like link between the mid twentieth century American traditionalists (I guess Saul Bellow is the best example) and the experimental 60's/70's post-modernists (Barth, Pynchon, etc.) that were soon to come. I guess a more apt (the book is at least partially about art), Brendan Fraser-less comparison would be Picasso who mastered traditional painting techniques then created something completely original.

I guess the problem is that being such a literary bridge might be too much of a burden for one novel to bear. I enjoyed the beginning of the book and the portions that dealt with art forgery. I thought there was an interesting theme developing with the main character's day/night work schedule being important to him because of lighting since all light provided in an actual painting (forged or otherwise) is artificial. As the book went on it followed some standard big book conventions: hundreds of characters, globe trotting, funny names and aliases. It just got to be too much, especially when there were such promising bits at the beginning. There were some Altman-like "eaves dropping on seven conversations at once" chapters that don't quite work as well in print as they do in Nashville or Short Cuts.

I ended up thinking that the book suffered from one of two (Kurt Cobain-related) effects:

- The Vaselines Effect - the album/book's reputation is enhanced beyond what it may deserve because it was overlooked when it came out. Fervent followers with means to do so spread its gospel (Cobain with the Vaselines, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and others with The Recognitions), fans of the followers freak out and assume they have to love all of their favorite author/musicians' influences (both why I own the Vaselines album and the Recognitions).

- The Nirvana Effect - the followers (the Seven Mary Threes of the world) are so omnipresent that they water down the novelty of the original. Without experiencing the novel's successors chronologically, it's hard to tell how groundbreaking it was. (Also known as The Pixies Effect)

The Short Story

2009-06-24T18:14:00.008-04:00

If reading all of these long books has had any effect on me, it's given me a better appreciation for short stories. I've enjoyed a few smaller collections this year including Wells Tower's debut Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned which fits somewhere between Elmore Leonard and Raymond Carver on the dude-tastic short story scale (a highly scientific scale graded in terms of alcohol content, Tower is about 70 proof). In the context of this project it's amazing what Tower can squeeze into 15-20 pages.

I've also dipped my toe (which is attached to a stolen fake leg) into the Southern, Catholic waters of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. I'm reading them sparingly so as not to get an Updike-ian overload. So far they all have unique, striking images that makes them easy to distinguish. When talking about them with friends it was a challenge to match up the element (false leg, serial killer, etc) with the excellent titles. I look forward to reading the rest but according to this entry, O'Connor believed her greatest accomplishment was teaching a chicken to walk backwards. Sadly no youtube footage exists. Thanks again to the decidedly un-Southern, un-Catholic girl who recommended O'Connor to me!

On the other side of the short story coin I recently tried Thomas Pynchon's short story collection, Slow Learner. After reading two Pynchon books this year and being interested in his new detective novel, I was curious to see what he had done in his early stories. I should have kept driving without stopping. Pynchon warns you of as much in the introduction where he basically explains that the stories are hack-y crap. Thank god for the DC Public Library and their help in weaning me of book purchasing. It's also kind of a strange meta-joke for a reclusive author to release an admittedly bad story collection which his nerdtastic fans will snap up solely because it has a 20 page personal intro wherein said recluse tries to covince you not to read (or at least not to judge him on) the stories that follow. Well played Lit Nerd King, well played.

If only I were a Mad Men character I could be writing my own short stories to submit to such fine publications as this:

Free Lunch

2009-06-10T19:48:00.004-04:00

I won a book on goodreads in a kind of preview review type deal. The book was The Spiders of Allah by James Hider. It's not a "big book" but I did get it through bookly means in an envelope from St. Martin's Press. Here's a review I posted on the site in hopes I'll be eligible to win more books I won't really like:

I entered the giveaway for the book mainly because of I thought the cover art was by Ralph Steadman. I was completely wrong.

When I re-read the synopsis of the book after winning I thought I'd be getting a non-fiction book that would add some religious and historical context to middle eastern conflicts. I was mostly wrong.

I enjoyed the two chapters that discussed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and some of the religious history behind it. Then the book takes a nearly 200 pg diversion into Iraq, largely ignoring religion (aside from occasional Sunni/Shiite tidbits), in favor of the standard Iraq war stuff of Saddam brutality, military embeds, translator fixers, and the general extreme-journo bravado that pops up a lot with Iraq War correspondents (I'm looking at you Lara Logan). I wasn't really interested for the same reasons I stopped watching Generation Kill after two episodes. I have information overload connected to the Iraq War. Sorry dude. Too late.

The book was ok, and it was free, but ultimately couldn't escape the "gonzo" cloud that it was branded with. Too often "new gonzo" authors (ahem, Matt Taibbi) come off as imitators rather than followers. I should probably learn to avoid books labeled this way and more generally continue to avoid war non-fiction.

Can't Beat 'Em

2009-06-04T21:18:00.005-04:00

I just finished Bob Spitz's biography of the Beatles. It was indeed a big book but I'm not sure it needed to be. They're probably the most omnipresent band of all time and were exhaustively covered in a media blitz 14 years ago. What's changed with the Beatles since then? George died. That's it. Their shit still ain't on iTunes.

Furthermore, George's death wouldn't have been included in Spitz's book which ends with the band breaking up. I'm usually ok with sad or generally unhappy endings but all the passive aggressive ego and legal/business posturing that went on in the last few years of the band is a major turnoff and Spitz doesn't do a good enough job putting it in perspective with the years of great work they did. He also doesn't really point out that they were pretty damn immature and had basically experienced an amount of publicity that could take a serious toll on anyone's personality. Some primary interviews might have helped, but instead it's studio hands or heads of early fan clubs. The only quotes from the actual Beatles are either VERY well known or from the actual Anthology documentary (which, by the way, had the benefit of being able to play the song while talking about how it was recorded).

So I guess I'm saying that, aside from some Yoko-bashing (always appreciated), this book was about as necessary as the movie Troy.

Te Gusta Flann?

2009-06-02T18:12:00.012-04:00

As I may have noted before, I make a lot of trips to the Daedalus Books Warehouse in the anonymous business park wastelands of Columbia, MD. You can't really go there looking for anything specific as their stock is largely dependent on which publishers' eyes were bigger than their stomachs. There's always at least three things I want there, I just have to spend time browsing, but for $3-4 a pop, it's worth it. That much browsing can give you a false sense of an author's popularity. "Have I actually heard of this guy or have I just been seeing his unwanted overstock here for the past three years?"

I'd been seeing Flann O'Brien's novels there for a few years before I picked up the big book project's own Complete Novels last year. After seeing unwanted copies of The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth I made a point of looking Flann up on Wikipedia. I was intrigued enough by the multiple super-Irishy pen names to pick up the Complete Novels on my next visit. I also noticed that there was an entire publisher named after his novel, The Dalkey Archive.

These novels were fitting follow-ups to Ulysses in my year of potato-eatin' readin'. Obama fave Joseph O'Neill awarded O'Brien the bronze medal in Irish Lit (Gold, Silver) in an excellent Atlantic Monthly reexamination. Apparently the dude had a tough time of it during his life and never even got The Third Policeman, his second (an my favorite of his) novels published.

So over a couple weeks of federal negotiated rule-making I was able to go through the works of one of his pseudonyms. The novels broke down like so:

At Swim-Two-Birds - Reeeeeeeeally experimental. Funny in parts, but I don't think I got it. Involves several layers of books within books. Too much of a "looking into opposite mirrors" experience at times. It also includes a quote that has been proven wrong by a certain movie and Ireland's Olympic medal counts: "With all his faults and by God he has plenty, the Irishman can jump. By God he can jump. That's one thing the Irish race is honoured for no matter where it goes or where you find it - jumping. The world looks up to us there." I liked it, but not as much as...

The Third Policeman - Very funny and much more focused. Involves a gag in which an Irish-equivalent, Hot Fuzz, country policeman purports his theory that people ride bicycles so much that they exchange molecules and at a certain point people can become more than 50% bicycle and be dangerous to society.

The Poor Mouth - Originally written in Irish and published under O'Brien/O'Nolan's other pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. A good, short parody of Irish sentimentality. Poor Frank McCourt wouldn't have a career if more people thought this book was funny.

The Hard Life - A coming-of-age/bildungsroman story that takes clearer, better shots at Catholicism than A Portrait of the Artist.... I might have enjoyed this more because I read it after attending an awful Catholic wedding service.

The Dalkey Archive - Supposedly Flann's worst. I liked it mostly because it rehashes the crazy bicycle story from the (as then unpublished) The Third Policeman and because James Joyce appears as a character who never actually died and forgets that he wrote Ulysses.

It's kind of a given that a guy who came up with two good pseudonyms would have some great (and Irish-tastic) character names. Here are but a few:
- Pooka MacPhellimey
- Sgt. Pluck
- Policeman MacCruekeen
- Father Fahrt (har har har)
- Finnbarr and his brother, Manus
- McGettigan
- Sgt. Fottrell

God this picture kicks ass:

The dude was long on the short of it

2009-05-04T17:19:00.004-04:00

There he is, churning out 6 pages worth of consummate New Yorker short story. The problem is, I don't always like New Yorker short stories. So getting through all of Updike's Early Stories: 1953-1975 - even just a few stories at a time, over more than a month - was tough at times.

Earlier this year I had my first encounter with Updike in the form of his Rabbit novels. Here were my thoughts way back then. Reading those four novels back-to-back might have spoiled me on his characters. There just isn't enough time in some of these stories for much depth in the characters and at their most one-dimensional Updike's characters can be pretty weak and samey from story to story. The young men are naive and weak, the older men dashing horndogs, and the women, most disturbingly, often relegated to scenery or singular objects of desire. Also, most everyone is white as hell. I feel like I need some Junot Diaz just to remind myself that writing doesn't have to be this prim. Here's an example of Updike having some good, clean fun:

(I should note that although I am an aesthetically-inclined white dude - Updike's office above looks awesome to me - I have pretty easily resisted the urge to play the recorder during my adult life.)

Some specific stories:
Pigeon Feathers - A beautiful story from the Olinger section of the book that was pretty damned great until it gets Intelligent Designy at the end. Maybe people who believe in I.D. should use this story instead of a crazy museum with displays of dinosaurs and people hangin' out. Flintstones episodes do not equal science people.

A&P - An appropriately short story that supposedly gets taught in school. It kind of gets lost in this huge book.

Maples Stories - This crazy couple pops up a bunch in these stories. Their super-fun marriage featured an "understanding" and there was much talk of one spouse knowing about the other's lover. How protestant, or maybe, Russian?

Friends from Philadephia - A nice lil story I enjoyed because of the Raymond Carver-like tension that just hung over everything. It just seemed like someone was about to shout, "WHADDA YA THINK YER BETTER'N ME?!?!" at any moment. But they don't. Carver would love it. Then he would get drunk and fall asleep.

The section "Far Out" seems to include stories where Updike experimented outside his comfort zone, including a story about dinosaurs. And like David Sedaris' weird animal fiction, the less said, the better. Actually, these stories were worse than that. Sorry to drag you into this David. Tell the Rooster I said, "hey."

I started Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (from his "Complete Novels" - a big book) alongside a rereading of Middlesex. Supposedly O'Brien's an under-read Irish writer actually named Brian O'Nolan who also wrote under another super-Irish pseudonym: Myles na gCopaleen (not misspelled, I promise). As an over-reading, potato-lovin' Irish-American I thought I'd give him a shot. I'm interested to see influence of Joyce since I'm enjoying Ulysses more and more in retrospect (maybe the best way to enjoy it?).

Tolstoys R Us

2009-05-03T15:17:00.004-04:00

Another one down. Anna Karenina was slightly more focused than War and Peace, but only slightly. There were still a ton of characters with complicated names and titles, but at least Napolean doesn't get introduced in the last 1/4 for no apparent reason. Tolstoy's characters have deep, brooding feelings that he reveals to readers in a frank, understandable, but still artful way. It's just a shame his major works don't seem as focused (duh) as his shorter fiction like The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

I was also glad that I went to the library and got a contemporary translation. I read the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace and while it may have more accurately represented the pomp and manners of some of the society scenes (balls/salons/et al), it was a bit of a chore. I checked out the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Karenina and was glad to have something a little less stuck-up. The main characters were compelling and the story moved well, but I could have done without some of the side plots. On the whole I enjoyed it, and it was a nice change of pace from some of the other stuff I've been reading in that it had complex female characters. A nice touch from the bearded oldster seen above.

Since Jeffrey Eugenides seems to be dragging his feet on a new novel and also because this project is dragging and inherently stupid; I decided I'm gonna re-read Middlesex while reading Flann O'Brien's volume of complete novels.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on Updike's short stories.

Update

2009-04-20T20:16:00.003-04:00

Because the only thing better than making a list is checking things off, here's an update:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1,079p) 1.14.09
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (721p) 1.26.09
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (729p) 2.3.09
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike (1,516p) 2.16.09
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (776p) 3.7.09
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (704p) 3.14.09
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1056p) 3.22.09
Ulysses by James Joyce (768p) 3.29.09
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (720p) 4.5.09
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (819p) 4.18.09
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (853p)
The Early Stories: 1953-1975 by John Updike (864p)
The Complete Novels (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) by Flann O'Brien (787p)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956p)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (706p)
The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz (992p)
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773p)
The USA Trilogy (The 49th Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) by John Dos Passos (1,144p in 3 volumes)
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy (1192p)

Barth Bag

2009-04-19T19:35:00.002-04:00

I tried to prepare for John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor by reading the poem it seeks to explain. Thanks to Google books and the Harvard College library, I was able to check out an interweb version for the low, low cost of free. It's a good thing too, because after about 15 pages of lower case f's instead of s's, I gave up.

I didn't give up on the actual book though. I enjoyed it. I think Barth pulled off the "big, long joke" better than Sterne did in Tristram Shandy (granted he had a couple hundred more years of literary technique to draw from). I guess Barth was bigger in the 60's and 70's because his internet presence is seriously lacking when compared to his post modern buddies like Pynchon, who, as noted in my Gravity's Rainbow posts, has his own wiki site to explain all his crazy crap. Barth's crazy crap is a little more focused but still involves a ton of characters (who are often disguised as other characters) and some kind of cast list would have been helpful.

The book also taught me some (probably inaccurate) things about Maryland history, namely that it was full of Catholic-hating whores in the 1600's, so I'm glad I finished it before the upcoming Maryland Day. Barth was born in Cambridge and taught at Hopkins, so to paraphrase Brendan, "his Maryland roots are true." I first read him (Barth, not Brendan) in a "Maryland in Literature and Film" class as a freshman in college. I remember hating the assigned stories in Lost in the Funhouse, but that probably had little to do with the writing and something more to do with: (1) being a freshman in college, (2) more eagerly awaiting the part of the class that dealt with Homicide: Life on the Street, (3) probably not actually reading the stories, and (4) the fact that the class was taught by a bowling pin shaped professor from the Spanish Dept. Barth himself has been know to hang at my alma mater as seen in the photo below featuring his turkey neck and Billy Crystal's favorite author.Note: Pete will be the only one who understands most of this. Sorry to the other 5 readers.

...and another thing

2009-04-18T10:35:00.003-04:00

In Tristram Shandy, the author/narrator keeps referring to the reader as "Ma'am." I didn't take kindly to that presumption. Not one cotton pickin' bit. Damn, I'm grizzled.

Exceptionally Long Jokes

2009-04-12T20:41:00.007-04:00

I finished Tristram Shandy a couple weeks ago. I laughed at parts, I get that nothing is supposed to happen, but overall it seemed like a joke that was stretched a little long and had probably already been stretched to its limits en espanol. Like Ulysses, I appreciate that someone was messing with narrative form so long ago but in this case the tone didn't change enough to keep me interested for 700+ pages. It's also likely that I'm suffering from long book fatigue and that Tristram Shandy was the first casualty.

This may also be a rare case in which I liked the movie more than the book. I thought Michael Winterbottom's 2006 flick was able to point out the humor in the book and add a little of its own related to the book's unfilmability (word?). It had all that and Steve Coogan too.

I'm reading the Sot-Weed Factor now and supplemented it with the shorter, unrelated, non-project book Winesburg, Ohio. I loved it and not only because of its length. Sherwood Anderson managed to articulate, in simple and evocative language, a variety of human feelings. Good stuff.

Addition: I've added Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain to the project and have instituted a "one-in, one-out" policy on book buying. Friends, neighbors, family and the local libraries will all benefit from my book overflow.

Joyce Division

2009-04-03T18:45:00.003-04:00

Q: How Irish is Ulysses?
A: The main character has a lucky potato.

That's some serious Irish (apologies for multiple "I-words"). I'm glad I followed the recommended Joyce reading order of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist... before Ulysses. Dubliners gives a idea of the scope and feel of Joyce's Dublin and it's useful to have read Portrait so you know what an unsatisfied wiener Stephen Daedalus is when he pops up in Ulysses.

Some of the non-Shakespeare literary references in the beginning sailed over my head, but once the book got into the experimental sections I really enjoyed it. Specifically the drunken hallucination play script of "Circe" and the FAQ-style "Ithaca." It's amazing to think of someone fucking with the novel format almost a hundred years ago when someone who attempted it just recently is being hailed as a visionary. Joyce shows it's possible to convey feeling and narrative information in vastly different ways. Whatta guy!

I haven't been reading much this week: I'm a few hundred pages into Tristram Shandy and I read a few more Updike stories.

Ex Games

2009-03-27T17:44:00.006-04:00

I finished The Executioner's Song last weekend (which means I've spent the intervening week looking for my third awesome Norman Mailer picture).

I enjoyed the book a lot. I could have done without the extended battles over TV rights to Gary Gilmore's story, but I guess extraneous detail is kind of Mailer's thing. The book also had a better chance than Armies of the Night or Naked and the Dead since it dealt with a lot of issues I'm interested in, namely: the death penalty and society using unique, personal situations as larger political causes. It ultimately convinced me to pick up a cheap copy of Mailer's book on the Rumble in the Jungle, The Fight, from Better World Books. Maybe I should have just watched When We Were Kings again instead.

Not unlike Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Mailer did a great job of turning actual people into great literary characters, making this the second book in a row that I enjoyed because of a similarity to Capote.

I haven't found much Capote in Ulysses which I'm about halfway through. So far the book feels like James Joyce keeps poking at my brain with his cane and if he doesn't stop I'll slap the eyepatch right off his dead Irish face. I've started the big book of Updike's early short stories to help keep my sanity.

Clubfootin'

2009-03-15T10:23:00.006-04:00

This week, I began and finished W. Somerset Maugham's (pictured above as a Vincent Price-ish ghoul) autobiographical Of Human Bondage. It was a relatively easy read after being bogged down in Gravity's Rainbow for a month. Maugham was Capote's favorite writer and the similarities in writing style are clear. There are some great, descriptive sentences in Of Human Bondage; almost all of which relate directly to the plot (ahem, Pynchon...).

Philip Carey's wiener-ness reminded me a lot of Augie March and I thought their relationships with women and frequent occupation shifts were also similar; although March's trip to Mexico (never turns out well for anyone) is replaced with Carey's stay in Paris. Carey is in Paris at the right time for Maugham to engage in some kick-ass impressionist name droppin' (Monet, Manet, Lisa Bonet, etc.) and also briefly allude to Gauguin who would later appear as "Charles Strickland" in Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.

In other Big Book news I'm following The Morning News' Tournament of Books mainly for some good reading ideas and also because John Hodgman and Junot Diaz are judges. Two big books are in the running for the coveted Rooster: Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country. Both are award winning epics, available at my local library but I'm not sure I'm interested enough in either to add 900 more pages to the project.

Next Up: Last Chance for Mailer - The Executioner's Song

Cartoon Dog, Bear or Cat

2009-03-12T20:51:00.002-04:00

I finished Gravity's Rainbow over the weekend and the only thought I've been able to come up with is a description of the author in the Achewood patois.

Pynchon: The dude is just bursting with elements.

This is probably more of a Ray Smuckles comment (though lord knows why he's reading post-modern fiction) as all of Cornelius Bear's books are leather-bound.

..and I'm OK

2009-03-03T20:41:00.004-05:00

I passed the halfway mark of Gravity's Rainbow on my train ride home today. I am enjoying it, but I'm having a tough time getting through it and motivating myself to pick the book back up. The "main plot" (if there is one) is constantly pushed aside in favor of dense digressions into random, mostly fictional European towns, myths, and weapons. The digressions themselves are mostly good, but I rarely remember what the hell was going on in Slothrop's quest each time I pick it up.

I can say that I really don't like the "silly songs" throughout. I guess they remind me too much of the higgledy piggledy/double dactyl crap that always seems so damn forced and only amusing to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me..." commentators. Silly songs should be sung (see above), not shoved into otherwise funny WWII postmodern fiction.

Gravity's Brainblow and Update

2009-02-18T20:11:00.003-05:00

I'm forty-some pages into Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and I'm ready to declare it one of the hardest books I've ever read. The sentences are very complex and often require multiple passes to get any idea of what the hell's going. I'm enjoying the "absurdity of war" tone that reminds me of one of my favorite books, Catch 22.

Luckily, some nerds have created an entire wiki site for the book. Unfortunately, most of the contributors wish they were Thomas Pynchon and the annotated guide is less than helpful. Most of the annotations don't explain the book's many references, merely point out inconsistencies and errors in someone else's critical companion book. Nerds.

The one piece of worthwhile Gravity's Rainbow interweb ephemera is Zak Smith's collection of Illustrations of Every Page of Gravity's Rainbow (see page 26 above). It also reminded me that I've completely abandoned my illustration blog. Complete Illustrated Sot-Weed Factor anyone?

So far I've finished four of the books in my project. I hope to actually finish before the end of the year and resume my regularly scheduled reading.

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (819p)
The USA Trilogy (The 49th Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) by John Dos Passos (1,144p in 3 volumes)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956p)
Ulysses by James Joyce (768p)
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1056p)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (721p)
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (704p)
The Complete Novels (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) by Flann O'Brien (787p)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (776p)
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773p)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (720p)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (853p)
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike (1,516p)
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1,079p)
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (729p)
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy (1192p)
NEWThe Early Stories: 1953-1975 by John Updike (864p) NEW

Wabbits

2009-02-16T21:01:00.004-05:00

Apologies for the black and white photo.

I've just finished the last of Updike's four "Rabbit" novels. I really enjoyed them and am glad that this project and his recent death (and many subsequent appreciations) encouraged me to read Updike. Much like with Mailer, I didn't know what to expect from him other than he was a respected American author who could be a bit of a bastard. Updike had quite a bit more style than Mailer and more of an ability to turn the boring beautiful. Also, Updike was able to write Rabbit Angstrom (at least in the early novels) as the type of shitty person that Mailer was in real life.

Reading the four novels in succession had it's rewarding moments; particularly being able to see the parallels between Rabbit's early and late lives and the similarities between Rabbit and his son when they are at comparable ages. If it weren't for an all-day jury duty session during which the featured, alternate entertainments were the films Radio, Flightplan, and Calendar Girls; I probably wouldn't have blazed through them quite so quickly.

Next up, Gravity's Rainbow. A random goal: Read Ulysses before Bloomsday, possibly rereading The Odyssey beforehand, and watching O, Brother throughout.

Note: "Updike, fight" didn't yield any videos.

Down With Howie Z

2009-02-04T19:02:00.003-05:00

I had only watched one documentary about Howard Zinn before I started A People's History of the United States last week. I finished it last night and thought it was a great supplement to a lot American history that people already know. Some of the motives that Zinn assigns to the Founding Fathers might be a little too sinister but are probably at least a little true. It was a surprisingly easy read both because of Zinn's style and the fact that I wasn't concentrating on remembering names and dates but more on tracing the themes of oppression and struggle through more than 500 years of history. All that being said, it's not a very uplifting read, and I'm glad I'm done it. Onward to the snobby whiteness of Updike's Rabbit novels.

The Norman and the Dead

2009-01-27T20:25:00.005-05:00

I finished The Naked and the Dead last night. Some of my Mailer fears were confirmed. I didn't really enjoy it on the whole. I thought Mailer's simple-language style wasn't particularly evocative and was pretty boring when stretched over 700 pages. I did like the character sketches that gave background on the characters, both because of the way they were written and because they provided welcome respite from the overly detailed war narrative. I've read about similar military mismanagement issues in a much funnier book and actually quit on a recent televised presentation covering some of the same areas. So what you're left with after removing all of those parts is a lot of "he doesn't know any better/it was another time"-style racism. I'm still holding out hope that I'll enjoy The Executioner's Song since it's about an issue in which I'm actually interested and is often favorably compared to one of my favorite books, In Cold Blood.

Also, John Updike died. Meaning that Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, Howard Zinn and Bob Spitz are the only living authors left on my list. Watch out fellas. It also means that John Irving is the only one left alive to fight against the literary scourge (his opinion, not always mine) that is Tom Wolfe.

Next Up, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the Unites States.

Them's Fightin' Words

2009-01-19T11:29:00.006-05:00

Look at that crusty bastard. I'm not sure I have much a chance of liking Norman Mailer - The Person.
1) He's dead, so we couldn't have much of a productive conversation.
2) By all accounts he was a miserable asshole anyway.
3) He was a bit too stabby and punchy.

I've read The Armies of the Night and thought it was ok. I was a little annoyed by the third person, "The Author does this..., The author does that..., The author stumbles around drunk and pissing on things." The book also now falls in the "THE 1960s WERE THE MOST IMPORTANT DECADE EVER!!!" genre, which, as Hunter Thompson (and time) have pointed out isn't really true.

Mailer does pop up in some of my favorite places so I thought I'd take another shot at him (he's dead and can't fight back) with The Naked and the Dead, hoping that, when he wrote it in 1948, he wasn't seasoned enough to have an ego. I started it Thursday and so far it's taken me a little while to 'get into.' I like the cut away character sketches and maybe as I read more of them I'll be able to distinguish the soldiers in conversations on a deeper level than "Mexican Guy," "Noo Yoork guy," and "Jewish Guy." But maybe there isn't a deeper level, Mailer was just an asshole and Zombie Mailer will come back and punch me for saying so.

Bonus Video: (Extremely Shirtless) Mailer fighting Larry Sanders' Boss (starts at 1:33)

I guess all of these book previews will have to feature a fight video. I hope James Joyce and Flann O'Brien had an old fashioned Irish brawl at some point.

Toothbrushes?

2009-01-17T18:38:00.003-05:00

I finished Infinite Jest on Wednesday. It was obviously entertaining and readable enough for me to finish in just a couple of weeks, but I can't say it was as life changing for me as it seems to be for others. There are plenty of great scenes and some observations about human behavior (most notably during the AA meetings) that are dead-on and probably some more things I missed. I could never really separate the story from the author (maybe that's part of the point) and how much it seemed that he split the 300 voices in his head into individual characters and spread them across 1000+ pages. I'd say it was definitely helpful to have read DFW's non-fiction to understand his style and his interests before embarking on this very good brain dump. In summation, this book hurt my brain (in a good way) and my back (in a bad way).

Games, Challenges, and Contests

2009-01-08T21:00:00.006-05:00

After reading a very long introduction and play-by-play of a "game" of Eschaton -- the Infinite Jest tennis students' game that seems like a horribly nerdy combination of dungeons & dragons, Model UN, mathletes, and tennis drills -- I'll stick with Calvinball.

It seems like as appropriate a time as any to bring up the other personal reading challenges I have inspired. I've soundly outread my mom the last two years (this year I was awarded a handsome monkey bookmark for my victory) so when I explained my project to her she had to think of a personal challenge of her own. She decided, quite appropriately for a fourth grade teacher, that she would finish four of the series of children's books that she's begun but never finished: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter, Little House on the Prairie, and The Chronicles of Narnia. I made her add the slim, totally readable, Michael Chabon book that I gave her a few years ago. Never wanting to be left out and desperate to reintegrate to Continental US Society after a year in Alaska, my sister has pledged to read 100 books, at least 45 of which will be sad lady books. I'm like the Johnny Appleseed of stupid, self-regulated, Jones family reading challenges.

Update: 300 and 101

2009-01-07T21:10:00.004-05:00

300 pages (and 101 endnotes) into Infinite Jest seemed like a decent place to update my Big Book Project status.

I'm enjoying the book so far. When a mere 40 pages in, I naively explained to my friend Pete that, unlike most post-modern craziness, the book didn't contain obscure references. 260 pages and one 8.5 page fake imdb entry later I can safely say this is not the case. I get 2 of every 3 movie/director references and assume some others are fictional. I like the tennis jargon but think that the junior tennis academy students in the book are already better than I am, and if we ever played each other in a fictional universe where the years sponsored by specific products, they would beat me soundly.

I'm not as into the exhaustive prescription drug talk which tends to make me not care whether the drugs are real or not. It does seem to have moved past some of that into the more enjoyable rehab/psychological disorder discussions (which my sister may enjoy as a prospective substance abuse counselor).

It's also odd that Post-Modern fiction, with its free-wheelin', break-down the literature traditions, and narrative structure reputation seems to have conventions of its own that pop up in the book. The frequent shifts in time, setting, and narration are similar to what I've read by DeLillo and the goofy-named, intellectual weirdos are part of Pynchon's thing. Right? Good thing I like that stuff. (It should be clear from this half-assed comparison that I wasn't an English major).

I'll let you know how it's shakin' out in another few hundred pages.

Preview: Infinite Jest

2009-01-01T18:55:00.011-05:00

Recently I've watched two different film versions of Hamlet: Laurence Olivier's from 1948 and Kenneth Branagh's from 1996. Seeing Hamlet reminds you that every single band name, song lyric, movie, common phrase, and book title is related to Hamlet in some way. The title for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest comes from a line in one of the most famous scenes (Act 5, Scene 1, pictured above):

HAMLET: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio - a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

Alas, poor Wallace. I hadn't read much of his work other than the stray New Yorker story or graduation speech before he died in September. Since then, I've read and enjoyed his non-fiction essays in Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He analyzes actual facts, feelings, and experiences in such mind-f**king depth that I'm a little afraid of what will happen in his 900+ page work of fiction (not to mention the 96 pages of endnotes). Armed with two bookmarks, I'm jumping right in...tomorrow.

Bonus - Enjoy this video from Charlie Rose in which David Foster Wallace talks a bit about Infinite Jest and obviously hurts Jonathan Franzen's feelings (particularly from 11:00-14:00):

The suggestion that someone was "not delightful" was quite a slight in the 1996 long-haired author community.

Addition

2008-12-27T23:13:00.004-05:00

I'm adding Joseph McElroy's Women and Men to the list because, well, I got a Daedalus Books gift card for Christmas and their store had it for $5.

It seems to fit on the list because:
a) It's 1192 pages long,
b) This mention on the Millions blog compares it to Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis and Wallace who all appear on the list,
c) The cover is as grey and ominous as Underworld's, not to mention the title being similarly ambiguous.

The book's review in the NY Times makes me a little nervous, explaining that information about the characters is "set forth in a viscous, arch, hectoring, information-crammed, unparagraphed series of the longest sentences since William Faulkner's." I read The Bear in college and remember not enjoying the 2 full classes we spent dissecting one of 'tha Faulk's huge sentences. Not seeing paragraph breaks on a page puts the fear of God into me. Women and Men will probably go at the bottom of the pile for now.

Note: I also considered Norman Rush's Mortals (also mentioned in the Millions entry above), but the nicer, cheaper, hardback copy that Daedalus had wasn't 700 pgs. Sorry Norm.

The Project

2008-12-26T13:11:00.013-05:00

I buy books. A lot of books. Used Books. New Books. Big Books. Small Books. Good Books. Bad Books.

I buy big books with the best intentions but rarely pull them back off the shelf when it comes time to choose the next book to read. They sit there, thick-spined, silently judging. Larger books are no better or worse than shorter ones; just heavier and significantly more intimidating.

I've read and enjoyed a few of my huge books: Underworld, Don Quixote, and War and Peace, but my purchasing continues to outpace my reading.

Spending 2009 reading only books I own that are over 700 pages is really a clumsy combination of two of my favorite recent obsessive compulsive columns: Nick Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Reading" from The Believer and Noel Murray's "Popless" on The Onion's AV Club site. The main difference being that they are paid critics with actual insights and I'm only a dude on the interwebs with slight bibliomania and too much free time.

The (Completely Arbitrary) Rules
1 - Books/Volumes/Works must be over 700 pages in length.

2 - I'll still be reading comic collections and graphic novels of any length, 'cause it's not really the same thing.

3 - I've chosen 10 of my favorite authors and should they write any new books this year, I'll read them to cleanse my lit palate. The authors are: Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Chuck Klosterman.

4 - I usually don't quit on books, but slogging through 700+ pages of something I'm hating is different from just sucking it up and finishing On the Road. I'm giving myself 3 quits before I abandon the project.

5 - A few of the books/works/volumes below are either collected novels in one volume or one work spread across multiple volumes. I'll be trying to read those works straight through rather than book by book (as the author presumably intended, apologies to Dos Passos, Updike and O'Brien).

6 - I'll still be reading magazines. Hopefully this project will encourage more magazine reading because I've been falling behind on my New Yorker-ing, Believer-ing, and Stop Smiling-(ehhh...ing).

The Books
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (819p)
The USA Trilogy (The 49th Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) by John Dos Passos (1,144p in 3 volumes)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (956p)
Ulysses by James Joyce (768p)
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1056p)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (721p)
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (704p)
The Complete Novels (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive) by Flann O'Brien (787p)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (776p)
Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (773p)
The Beatles by Bob Spitz (856p)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (720p)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (853p)
Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) by John Updike (1,516p)
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1,079p including endnotes that are presumably essential reading)
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (729p)

There. A list that includes some of the most notoriously difficult and polarizing books. It's a little fiction heavy but probably accurately represents my normal fiction:non-fiction ratio. I might add Rick Perlstein's Nixonland if I get too bogged down in post-modern fictional insanity and want to read about a real-life crazy person (and if the library has a copy). I also might add David Simon's The Corner if I rewatch The Wire or Homicide at any point.

I'll try and give previews of each book in an attempt to explain why I thought I absolutely needed to own the book and why it's worth toting to a new apartment every two years.

I'll also be updating with my thoughts on the books, info on how the project is changing my book-buying habits, and, I guess, the inevitable back pain from lugging 700+ page books around town.