25 thoughts on “First Monday Book Day – Awards Season”

1. Holy bookmark! First Monday comes on a Monday this month!?

   I guess there's a new Bookmarm in town.

   For my part, over the past month or so, I've plowed through Guy Gavriel Kay's masterful historical fantasy novel, Under Heaven (so good I bought two copies, albeit about 6 months apart) and the last (mercifully) volume in the Robert Jordan epic Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light. I found this volume...tolerable. I probably will have to re-read the whole series in order to stitch back together the full story and, particularly, the last three books, which were only partly written/outlined by the time of Jordan's death.

   I've sinced moved on to (re-reading) from Minnesota's own Lois McMaster Bujold's oevre, this time the collection of novellas, Miles, Mystery and Mayhem, containing Ceteganda, Ethan of Athos and Labyrinth. Not her best works in the Vorkosiverse, but Ceteganda was plenty fun.

   1. Part of the experience of reading the final Wheel of Time book is the realization that it actually finished. A day that seemed it would never come.

      My brother currently has my copies of volumes 10-13, but once I get them back, I would contemplate a re-read of the series. (I re-read 1-12 when Towers of Midnight came out, but didn't start over for the last one).

2. Just finished Pale Fire (started on Wednesday, so a much better pace that G. R. or U.).

   I started by going back and forth between the Cantos and the Notes, then finished the Cantos, then finished the Notes.

   Good read. Now I need to plumb the Interwebs for what was obvious but that I missed.

   During commercials: Peter Oborne's Wounded Tiger, a History of Cricket in Pakistan. A fitting read in that I just added the Willow channel to our Comcast for a trial month. So far == wicket heroin.

   On deck: Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, 1084 pgs., natch.

   1. I've said it before, but Against The Day is my favorite Pynchon. To the point where I'm almost tempted to tackle it again, seeing that you're reading it. Enjoy. And please, feel free to discuss with me at any point along the way/when you're done.

      1. Just wondering after G.R. what is a reasonable reading rate to expect, book-lbs/week? I just checked and the print is small also - natch.

         1. It moved at about the same pace as GR for me, but that might not mean much to you, as you're faster than I was. I remember longer stretches of readable pages.

   2. Har. Nabokov said in an interview that Kinbote committed suicide after finishing the book.[10] The critic Michael Wood has stated, "This is authorial trespassing, and we don't have to pay attention to it,".

      Authorial trespassing - It's like Shakespeare saying years later after writing MacBeth, I meant to call him Ned Blackwell.

      1. Thoughts on Pale FIre, separated by section (I read each in sequence, occasionally referring backward to the poem from the commentary section)

         Foreword

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         The meticulous description of Shade's method of composition in the first few pages speaks to how central it seems that Nabokov wanted to place the poem. Then we get to Kinbote's interaction with the poem and it seems like our narrator is at odds with the author. Kinbote even says "Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality" and "for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word." It was Kinbote's interaction with Shade's widow (where he refuses to return the poem) that convinced me coming out of the foreword that he would be unreliable. That distrust of him probably also fed into my desire to read the poem as a single work, free from Kinbote's influence.

         Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos

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         The opening lines are really good. Probably the highlight of the entire poem for me. The poem as a whole was ambitious (I mean it talks about life, death, the afterlife, art, memory - all the big themes), but I don't know that it stands on its own. For me, it ended up being the necessary setup for the meat of the novel, which is Kinbote and Shade's dueling visions of what this poem should be. What the poem actually is ends up being less important.

         Commentary

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         And here it becomes clear that Kinbote isn't just unreliable. At one point he speaks of the temptation of replacing lines in Shade's poem with some that Kinbote claims appear in the notes of the poet. That only made me wonder whether the poem in the previous section was accurate or tampered with. What I decided on that question was that Shade was doing his utmost to avoid any contamination of his work by Kinbote's stories of Zembla. The fact that he succeeds (to the degree that Kinbote is deeply wounded by the omission) speaks to the authenticity of the poem. The other big question is who is Kinbote? My theory was that he was a separate idea of the author's (either Nabokov or Shade, I'm not sure there's much differentiation) that was discarded. Instead of fading into memory or the background of some other tale, Kinbote keeps turning up, keeps working away at the author, sabotaging his ability to make something he considers true art. The poem refers to art's role in the afterlife, particularly in Canto Four, which makes Kinbote's ham-handed misinterpretations almost sinister and evil. Every significant location in the book seemed to be fictional, which could be interpreted to lend credence to the "everyone is a fictional character" meta-fiction idea.

         The book as a whole

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         It was fun to try out different interpretations of the unreliable narrator, but I can't shake the fact that while the book was funny at times and well-written throughout, it never had a point where the ideas of Nabokov was putting in (mostly about art/scholarship/criticism to my mind) came together in a way that had a lasting impact. A fine book, and I'll probably remember Kinbote and Shade for a while, but not something I would put on my all-time favorites list.

         1. First blush comments:
            A difficult work to read. Other N. works are well-blended, WYSIWYG (Pnin, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading), this one is forced.

            The thing about whether to go back and forth from dialogue to notes, O.K.

            I liked: poesy, depiction of N.E. collegia. I didn't like the work for me as a reader to have to figure it out.

            1. Agreed on most of these. I liked the requirements on the reader a little more.

               Additional shout out to the choice of title. "Pale Fire" (from Shakespeare, for the reflection that is moonlight) is about perfect.

3. I'm reading Ray Bradbury's From the Dust Returned which I'd picked up at this year's library book sale. Also, I received the book The World's Shortest Stories -- Murder. Love. Horror. Suspense. from a friend of mine, after he thought of me when he saw it. It's a collection of Fifty-Five Fiction stories; I guess he'd read my Play with the Prose entries on my blog.

4. Two of those (Chu's and Heuvelt's) were in the Tor bundle advertised last year.

   I blitzed through Alastair Reynold's Blue Remembered Earth. Set in 2160, it is a more positive take on the future than his other works. I enjoyed it immensely and am waiting for the sequel to be available in mass-market paperback.

   To hold me off until then, I took on Neal Stephenson's Reamde. Only a bit over 1000 pages. So far good but I have another 500 pages to go.

5. I have Anathem sitting on my dresser, mocking me.

6. In addition to my Hugo reading, I worked through a few books in August.

   This is Not a Novel by David Markson
   This book is brilliant. It's experimental in that it states its intentions early on to create something that has no plot, no characters, no setting, no passage of time. "Writer is weary unto death of making up stories." The amazing thing is that Markson pulls it off. I would have read this in one sitting if I could.

   "You can actually draw so beautifully. Why do you spend your time making all these queer things?
   Picasso: That's why."

   How to Catch a Coyote by Christy Crutchfield
   This wasn't an easy read for me. I had to sit down and think about it afterward. Not because the subject matter was disturbing or difficult, but the way the book was put together.

   It's the story of a family, we're introduced to Daniel first, but there's also his mother, his father and his sister. The book moves back and forth in time, so I found myself often checking the timeline laid out in the first chapter to see what had happened and what had yet to happen.

   The writing is straightforward, which managed to sneak up on me a little bit, because each section felt like I was getting it, and I was following everything. The family is poor and Daniel is going to be the first to finish college. The family has a history that's not helping in any way, all alluded to in the first chapter. The rest of the book carries us through all those events, and we get a real sense of all of these characters and how they struggle against those stumbling blocks.

   I think the word I'm looking for is spare. The book is spare, but then you look back at it once you're done and it manages to add up to something that carries real weight.

   Authority by Jeff Vandermeer
   Book 2 in his trilogy (Book 3 comes out next week). This book made book 1 better, I thought. The premise of the trilogy is that something (it's still not clear what) has taken over a significant part of the southern coast of the US. It is contained, but within that containment, the environment has been radically modified. Book 1 (Annihilation) followed an expedition into Area X. Book 2 follows the scientists and bureaucrats at The Southern Reach (responsible for the study of Area X) as they deal with the results of that expedition. Lots of detail early on this book, but it settled in and delivered a pretty good story. I'm excited to read the conclusion.

   Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones
   Shane Jones always creates a surreal world that is very ... visual. In this book, there is a village where everyone has a certain number of crystals within them. When the crystals run out, they die. Remy (the main character) and her family are overshadowed by grief and death, while their village is being consumed by either the nearby city or the sun (or maybe both). Everybody wants the crystals that the village mines, but for very disparate reasons. It's about addiction, or grief, or growing up.

   Beneath Liquid Skin by Berit Ellingson
   I liked quite a few individual sentences in this book. Often I liked those sentences more than the stories themselves. My favorite stories were the longer ones, "The Tale That Wrote Itself" about a farmer who writes a story that only contains truth, and "Still Life of Hypnos" about a man obsessed with decomposition.

   Throne of Blood by Cassandra Troyan
   Didn't like it. If poetry uses grotesque imagery and challenging language, I wish that the theme it tries to convey was a little less self-centered.

7. For my September big read, I'm tackling The Idiot. Started last night, I've enjoyed the first 90 or so pages.

8. I was on vacation a lot in August, so I picked up The Passage by Justin Cronin as a beach read. It’s your basic story about a post-apocalyptic wasteland swarming with mutant vampires. I’d actually heard a lot of praise for it, including that it was considered to be a “literary” take on genre fiction, which sounded very intriguing to me. But after reading it, I really don’t understand the hype. There really wasn’t anything literary about it. It had all of the tropes and cliches that you would expect from any other genre novel, the writing was proficient but not especially stylish, all of the characters only existed in service to the plot, and nothing about it was particularly challenging or cerebral. It was also about 400 pages too long. It was pretty darn entertaining though.

   1. Note: I don't think there's anything bad about genre fiction. I enjoy it a lot. It's just very different from literary fiction. I'm not sure why so many critics conflated them in this case.

   2. It was also about 400 pages too long. It was pretty darn entertaining though.

      

   3. I read The Passage a while ago, and I agree with pretty much everything you say. Maybe only 200 pages too long, but definitely nothing amazing. If you ignore the praise it got for whatever reasons and just read it, it's enjoyable enough.

      I picked up the sequel, The Twelve, off the bargain rack this weekend. I'm expecting more of the same tropes and cliches, so I probably won't be disappointed. I'll fill you in next month.

9. I read Shot All To Hell on the plane over. It's a mostly well researched account of the James Younger gang's attempt to rob the Northfield bank. I can't really recommend the book as I wanted to discard it well before the gang even reaches Northfield.

   1. just go rent The Long Riders. And then buy The Roommate's bio of James, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.

      1. I may just do that. If I buy his book off amazon does he get 4 cents in the mail?

         1. Heh heh heh. I think they are trying to shift to paying in store credit.

            coinkadinkly, he and I have been having a tête-à-tête today on the BF about the evils of teh Amazon.

10. I read Ham on Rye in about 3 days. There wasn't really a plot, per se, just an account of how Henry Chinaski (a thinly veiled Butkowski I assume) grew up. Still, a good insight into life in the 20's and 30's.

    I'm about half way through Elmore Leonard's Fire In The Hole collection, the title story of which is the pilot episode of "Justified". I'm definitely liking his style. His reputation as a short story master is well-earned.

    I'm definitely going to seek out more from each of those authors.

    1. Mr. Leonard is getting put on hold. I just got an email from the library telling me my copy of "I Am Zlatan" is available.

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