More Abiblia

I've been too quiet here. Too quiet for my own satisfaction. I want to be here - but for some reason I'm blank on putting thoughts on paper (er, silicon?).

I'm in the midst of another season of "I just can't finish ANYTHING I start reading." I suspect there's some more broadly-based discontent at work; whatever it is it's agitating.

And what I do finish I'm finding it hard to write about, despite the fact that that’s the entire point of bothering to blog. It depends on what I’m reading. What more is there to say about a classic like Three Men in a Boat (let alone, The Great Gatsby)? Or about a highly regarded and broadly exposed contemporary bestseller like The Time Traveler’s Wife (let alone, Possession)? And it isn’t only a prideful resistance to exposing my own banal reflections to scrutiny that keeps me quiet. It’s also my natural gravitation to the universal, the contextual, the 30,000-foot perspective, rather than the personal, the specific, the immediate. And the place of The Great Gatsby in the universe seems like well-covered ground, even if it were a topic I were better qualified to meaningfully discuss.

Then there are the times when I can't seem to muster the energy to mold my thoughts into cohesive prose - though another reason for being here is to force myself to do exactly that.

Though I know these reservations have merit, they hold me back from doing what I’ve set out to do. Excess noise might be the path to value. I just have to find a more inspiring track to ride for a while. I've got a few ideas.

Do you hate it? I hate it.

Sam at Book Chase pointed out this Times (of London) article in which various critics reveal the targets of their personal literary loathing - and the occasional leatherbound Waterloo. Predictably, there are a few common offenders: Crime and Punishment, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses; various works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand.

It's a fun subject to discuss with friends. I know that Kit, my college roommate, did grave battle with Moby Dick; My Sister the Blond Artist once greatly objected to my recommendation to The Inn at Lake Divine.

In some respects, "What's the worst book?" is a more easily digested question than, "What's the best book?" because, in context and among similarly-minded people, it's readily understood to be shorthand for, "What book gave you the worst reading experience?" and for some reason that's a fairly comfortable flavor of subjectivity to indulge. Though I haven't encountered a great abundance of books that I truly hate, there are a few I can place on the spectrum from ambivalence to repulsion.

• Though I don't hate it - I actually quite like the story itself - The Lord of the Rings struggled weakly to maintain my interest, as do most works in the same general class of fantasy. This would probably surprise most of the people close to me - My Sister the Blond Artist is a particular Tolkien fan, and my parents like fantasy generally, as do most of my closest friends (you can't help but keep questionable company in engineering school - though my parents are a librarian and minister, so it's not just the geek factor). The genre leaves me cold. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, gives an evocative account of being romanced by "the north," as he classed all the Norse-inspired imagery that frames up his own and Tolkien's fantasy. It's not an experience I've shared. The earthiness, the jaggedness, the savagery implied, all abraid, rather than excite, my own sensitivities.
  
  
• Steinbeck is a turnoff, and after writing the above, I think the reason for this is similar to my response to fantasy. Which sounds terribly odd, since I know few authors less fantastic. But it's the horrible bleakness, in combination with the Western and Country factors with which I find it hard to make a connection. It's not that I only like books in which pleasant things happen to happy people, as described by refined and delicate narrators - far, far from it. It's just that there's a certain type of terrestrialism that causes me so much anxiety, at a fundamental level, that it becomes to hard to appreciate the art that carries it, because it's too difficult to consume a novel-sized serving. If I'm honest with myself, this is probably also why I've never taken to Southern Gothic as much as I would like. Sometimes, I think I must be the reincarnation of a supporting character from a better Edith Wharton novel.
  
  
• I've also managed to source endless ambiguous dissatisfaction from the works of Dickens. Taken with the above, confessing this does nothing to improve my sympathetic image. But: corn should be sold by production volume. Fiction, like software, should not.
  
  
• The Catcher in the Rye is an easy target. As a favorite book, Catcher ranks right between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road on the "refuse a second date, and no goodnight kiss, either" scale. Unfortunately, it's also a durable member of the secondary education canon, at least in the U.S. I moved a lot growing up, so with changing schools and differences in local curricula, I actually had to complete coursework on Catcher several times. I haven't totally forgiven the universe for that. For an assignment in the eleventh grade, I did write a rather amazing satire of it that earned me loads of unsolicited extra credit. I'm still insanely proud of that. But it doesn't change the fact that Holden is a phony.
  
  
• Tender is the Night has plenty of devotees. Hemingway. Faulkner. Doppleganger. It drives me crazy. Yes, the plot is disturbing - a psychiatrist marries a madwoman in order to catalyze their mutual self-destruction. But my problem was that I didn't understand the book, in a very particular sense of the phrase. I recall re-reading the same paragraphs, over and over again, trying desperately to figure out what the component sentences had to do with one another. I believe myself to be a person of at least average intelligence, so I don't know what to think about that. But I don't like it. I love Gatsby; I fanatically adore every piece of Fitzgerald's short fiction I've ever read; I enjoyed his other novels in a nondescript way. But Tender does something unpleasant to my universe.
  
  
• There is exactly one book that I hate so extremely, so viscerally, so passionately, that I feel an immediate physiological change in myself whenever I see the cover. My remarks about it will be brief, since my reaction to the very thought of it is so overwhelming and involuntary that I absolutely cannot discuss it rationally. In melodramatic moments, I want to retire early and dedicate my life to destroying every copy in print with my bare hands. It's Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. If you're not familiar, the entire volume consists of a self-indulgent jeremiad delivered by the title character, who is both an ecoterrorist and a talking gorilla. Yes. Don't ask me how this happened, but I once found myself stuck on a transcontinental flight with this book as my only reading material. Never before or since have I been tempted to pray for an act of international terrorism to be performed in my presence. One word: Blech!
  

So, I want to know: who's on your list of published enemies?

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 2

My devotion to the audiobook is well documented here. Without them, I doubt I ever would have managed to clean my last apartment, and I'm sure my previous commute would have driven me to insanity years earlier. The selection available in public libraries, particularly offerings on CD (versus cassette), has exploded in the last five or six years. Another brilliant advance is that many public libraries now have audiobooks available for internet download, generally through contract with a third party. Usage rights vary, but this is a really, really great thing.

I've been leaning heavily on the audiobook front lately, since I've been working on two very tedious projects - that is, work projects that involve tedious busy-type work but which are too technically involved to delegate to anyone cheaper. Through trial and error, I've discovered that boring-but-brainy work is most compatible with genre mysteries and children's fiction - amusing and undemanding fare. The former often come in series, of course, so it's not hard to find something acceptable; I have a standing list of recommendations for the latter from my mother, the children's librarian. Here's some of the selection that's been getting me through spreadsheet purgatory this month:

Because of Winn Dixie (Kate DiCamillo): From now on, I'm referring to my dad as "the Preacher." And I'll name my next dog Safeway.

Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry): Poor kid. I wouldn't have liked it if my parents had had another kid when I was ten, either.

Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (E.L. Konigsburg): Not that memorable. It involved a nursing home, a professional organizer, an expensive home theater system, and a ten-year-old with a far-fetched grasp of contemporary philosophy.

Wedding Planner's Daughter (Colleen Paratore): set on Cape Cod, so kind of nostalgic.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (Lawrence Block): not too terribly forgettable. I don't think I've read very many other books actually set in the 1970's. At least, I can't remember any.

Death of a Charming Man (M.C. Beaton): Part of a very redundant series set in the Scottish highlands.

The Jackal's Head (Elizabeth Peters): I need to learn not to bother with Peters books that aren't the Amelia Peabody series.

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 1

My reading concentration has been feeble lately, for one reason and another. I've been flitting from book to book, finishing little or nothing; unable to engage the unfamiliar, re-reading instead; collapsing into essay collections. The congregation on my nightstand is eclectic:

• Orwell: A Biography - a children's volume, shelved in the adult section of the library. I've always had a mild brain crush on this guy.
  
  
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - I always thought this was the one Fitzgerald novel I didn't loathe - I adore his short fiction - but I don't think I'm in the right mood at all for that sort of re-read.
  
  
• Girl Meets God (Lauren Winner) - I love this woman. I love any book that includes observations like, "There are no great movies about Jewish trees."
  
  
• At The Corner of East and Now (Frederica Mathewes-Green) - I love this woman, too. The first chapter includes the stories of her hippie-Hindu wedding and, many years and life turns later, of her husband, now an Orthodox priest, driving to a north Virginia feed store, dressed in his cassock, to buy a horse trough in which to perform immersion baptisms.
  
  
• Edgar Allen Poe: Collected Stories
  
  
• Please Understand Me (Kiersey) - for a review inspired by this conversation, of course.
  
  
• Understanding the Enneagram (Riso and Hudson) - ditto.
  
  
• The Young Learner's Bible Storybook - Something I often give at baby showers. The only Bible storybook I know of that includes the story of Jeremiah in the well. Actually, it's a very cool book - really an educational activity book, using very well told Bible stories as carriers for exercises in counting and colors. But I don't know why there's a copy by my bed.
  
  
• Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) - I finished this last year. I should put it away.
  
  
• The World of Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse) - Is there anything to be said about Wodehouse?
  
  
• In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) - I haven't even started it, but it's been sitting there for a long time.
  
  
• How to Pray (R.A. Torrey) - I promise, I didn't forget how.
  
  
• Collected Stories of Arthur Miller -an impulse purchase. Also a happy shade of yellow.
  
  
• The Curtain - An Essay in Seven Parts (Milan Kundera) - recruited to be carried downtown recently, almost exclusively on the basis of its portability. But Kundera is another brain crush candidate.

More later.

Can the fishes see it's snowing?

I'm fairly certain that I was never a child. I feel more convinced of that when I read A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wonder, magic - they seem foreign to me, rather than nostalgic. I don't regret it - I don't pine for the youth I didn't live - but I do feel the gap in my own experience, as though I lack a great chunk of the vocabulary of human life.

My mother says I sprung from the womb aged 40. That would imply that I'm still growing into my soul. That's an odd thought.

I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tram car.
- Dylan Thomas, on Christmas Afternoon

I'm collecting favorite Christmas stories, essays, and texts. My list is short so far, but in addition to Wales it includes

• "Xmas and Christmas - A Lost Chapter from Herodotus" by C.S. Lewis. Published in God in the Dock, though I'm not certain of the original source. A classical anthropological expose on the 50-day Exmas Rush.
• "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris, in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. A cleaner, more joyous, alternative to the (nonetheless hillarious) Santaland Diaries. Listening to the author's reading of this is one of my own personal holiday traditions.
  

Always open to more suggestions to add to the collection.