Ex Games

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'

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