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‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’
The beginning of next month comes around. You forget to write down the books. The middle of the month comes around. ‘I know,’ you think, ‘I’ll start writing about all the books I read in a month. But I’ll do it starting at the beginning of next month, so I don’t forget all the books.’
This carries on till you’re dead or you give up and start in the middle of the month.
I have a system for reading books, which is that I read poetry, non-fiction, then fiction, in that order. But to make sure that I read a good variety of things, I alternate between reading classic books (my definition of classic is, ‘Is the author dead?’ so that, e.g., Philip Roth became ‘classic’, by my morbid definition, sometime after I started this system) and contemporary (by not-dead authors) books. And, also, I read at least one poem every day, and in between each book, I read a short story and an essay from one of my ongoing books of short stories and essays. So, for example, I just read Quoof by Paul Muldoon (poetry, not classic), then I read an essay from The Penguin book of Feminist Writing and a short story from an odd textbook of short stories I picked up secondhand somewhere, and now I’m reading The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (non-fiction, not classic).
I allow myself some flexibility, so that I don’t get bored. For example, this month I also read everything by Neil Gaiman I’ve not read yet as my ‘fiction, not classic’ read for this cycle. I’ve also been reading The Mahabharata one book at a time, because it’s very long and would have taken several months of continuous reading to get through in one go.
Quoof, by Paul Muldoon
I loved Paul Muldoon when I was an undergraduate, but boy is he hard to get through now I have less time and fewer poetry professors to help explain things to me. I’ve talked before about the skill versus blood dichotomy, and I feel like in this collection Muldoon is unfortunately falling more on the side of having too much technique and not enough feel.
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby buys a lot of books and reads some of them, while feeling ambivalent about the whole project. It’s less a reflection on books and more a reflection on how they make him feel, with a lot of charming honesty along the lines of ‘I sort of forgot what this book was like because I read it on a plane and all I really remember now is the plane,’ which I’m sure we’ve all felt at one point or another. It does, however, make it a bit difficult to take his recommendations all that seriously. Hornby liked a book because he read it while in a good mood, but what if I read it when I’m in a bad mood?
But this is Hornby’s point: there’s no particular point in reading either the classics or the current critical darlings unless you’re having a good time. I agree with him, up to a point. The problem, though, is that he only applies this argument within the province of reading. Hornby clearly thinks that you should read, that it’s bad that many people don’t, that the number that don’t is growing, that the number of young people, in particular, that don’t is growing faster still. But, if people don’t enjoy it, why should they do it? This is exactly the same argument that Hornby applies to ‘reading the classics’, but he never examines how it applies to just plain ‘reading’, which he’s very much in favour of.
On a timely note, Hornby complains in an aside that there isn’t an NHS anymore because the current government and in particular the current prime minister has sold it off. Sound familiar? I imagine it does, as a lot of people agree with that assessment. Except, the government he’s thinking of is Labour, the PM he’s thinking of is Blair, and the year he’s writing in is 2004. So, how can it be that the NHS doesn’t exist anymore because the Tories/Rishi Sunak sold it off, when it was already sold off twenty years ago by Labour/Tony Blair?
This is not a political point. This is a parable about hyperbole.
31 Songs, by Nick Hornby
This was quite fun, in roughly the same way as Spree, and also quite annoying, in roughly the same way as spree. It is very subjective, as good criticism should be, but it doesn’t do enough objectivity, which good criticism must do.
M is for Magic, Fragile Things, The Sandman (vol. 1) and Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman
A lot of short stories and one graphic novel, by Britian’s foremost SFF writer, Neil Gaiman. We all love Neil, and everything you love about him is on display in the more-or-less random selection of his books I read this month. He’s always smart, he’s never obvious. I had a particularly fun moment reading M is for Magic, because it contains ‘Troll Bridge’, a short story I read when I was thirteen which I didn’t realise was by Gaiman at the time. But now I know! It’s very good.
Fair warning, there’s some overlap between these collections, because M is for Magic was a round-up of Gaiman’s work for younger readers (YA, rather than children’s), so you’ll come across the same stories more than once if you buy all three collections. Fans of American Gods should definitely pick up Fragile Things and Trigger Warning (in that order) because they each contain the further adventures of Shadow, the protagonist of Gods.
The Sandman is really great, but you know that already.
The Mahabharata, Books 16 and 17
I’ve been reading The Mahabharata, possibly the longest poem ever written, in translation (of course), one book at a time, for a year and a half. The main plot is now over. At the equivalent stage in The Odyssey, we’re now at the point where Odysseus goes up the hill to find his old dad, Laertes. Now, Yudhishtira and the rest of the Pandavas, having won back their kingdom and done due repentance for all the killing that entailed, are climbing the Himalayas, with their wife Draupadi and a dog, for some reason. The others all fall back in the course of the climb, due to not having enough yoga power, leaving Yudhisthira to forge on alone like George Mallory, to the peak.
‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism‘, by Oscar Wilde
I’ve been meaning to read this one for years. Probably the best of Wilde’s insight is this one:
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
Now, if a man writing in 1891 could work this out, one has to wonder how it happened anyway and how people could deny it was turning out so badly, for so long.
Wilde case is that individualism can only truly emerge under socialism, that the whole point of the activity is the flourishing of humanity. This is an insight I feel a lot of people on the left, especially on the environmentalist side of the movement, are badly lacking. If socialism is sold as a matter of belt-tightening, why would anyone buy it? The point has to be more freedom, more happiness, greater luxury for all
For people arguing for ‘capitalist’ individualism, they have to explain the clear attitude of capitalism that all things, including people, are only valuable insofar as they contribute to GDP. You cannot believe in individualism and immigration controls, or individualism and benefit sanctions. It is not coherent.
Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto (trans. Jesse Kirkwood)
This is a book about a murder which is solved by careful examination of train timetables, a summary which is both true and a little unfair. The plot is laid out almost systematically, with nothing wasted. There’s even a note at the end claiming that it was all based on real timetables for the year 1957, so presumably Matsumoto really sat down and checked them all thoroughly, just as his characters do. As a result of this reliance on the cold hard facts, it might is a little cold and hard at times, for all the the heroic detectives’ suspicions are originally aroused by an understanding of human nature. It also does something I really dislike in detective novels, and has the antagonist confess in a suicide note. I know Agatha Christie did it, too, but I still think it’s cheating.
Again Behold the Stars, by Alex Josephy
Rejoice, formalism fans: a book of Pertrarchan (usually) sonnets (mostly)!
I went to an open mic night, so naturally I had to buy some poetry, to make it worth the price of the train ticket for the poet. Josephy’s colleciton is inspired by historical records of a siege in Italy during the Renaissance. Particularly good is ‘Great Grandmother’, where the siege of the city becomes a metaphor for the advance of old age: ‘aches / Bombard her, cares dig trenches, / Starve and ravine her cheeks.’
In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for our Century, trans. Wong May
This has been my daily poem read for the past two hundred days or so. It comes with a book-length afterword by the translator, so I treated that as my contemporary non-fiction read for this cycle. Much more fun than your usual academic reflections on poetry, May’s afterword imagines the whole work laid out as a museum and is helped along by a cartoon rhino who makes helpful comments from the margins, like ‘Don’t bonzai me!’ and, more than once, ‘zzzzzz’.
May’s translations seem good, insofar as I can comment at all (not very much). I especially enjoyed the poems by Bai Juyi and ‘The Garden of Golden Valley’ by Du Mu which ends:
Blossoms fall,
A prodigious drift
Like a girl leaping
Off the porch
Archangel and The Ghost, by Robert Harris
There’s a particular problem you get when you read books by the same author in quick succession. This also happened with Hornby1 this month. It’s this: you start to notice all their quirks and it gets annoying, probably more annoying than it would be if you hadn’t read them so close together.
Consider the following description:
Someone whose job is more or less ‘writer’ (a journalist, an academic, a ghost writer) stumbles upon a document of some kind that will, if its contents are verified and become known to the world, profoundly change the world. This someone is a British man, roughly in his thirties, certainly no younger than 25 and no older than 45, and currently single, although he’s had some quite stormy long-term relationships with women, who almost all find him attractive, and vice-versa, in the recent past. He just can’t quite settle, you see. He is able to support himself in his career as more-or-less-a-writer despite being fairly dissolute, usually with a liking for whisky (it must be single malt Scotch), in particular. He knows lots of American men and finds them all very irritating.
The problem with the writing of Robert Harris – which I’m not saying I don’t enjoy! – is that description applies not only to both the books I read this month but also to Fatherland and even, with perhaps some small modifications this time, to his non-fiction work, The Hitler Diaries.
So, do read Robert Harris. It’s great, smart pop, but do be aware there’s a formula.
My back of the envelope maths says I read about a book a day in the second half of May, which is pretty good going. Will I beat that in June? No, because I’m starting with The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg2 Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, which will probably take me the whole damn month, by the end of which I might know what ‘phenomenology’ means. Why am I reading Hegel? To understand the most famous Young Hegelian a little better, of course. Just in case you thought my criticism of the USSR was a dumb kneejerk thing. It’s actually a really very intellectual kneejerk thing.
And another thing
I also watched loads of Star Trek, both old and new. I think it was about time Discovery came to an end, to be honest, though I’ll miss Saru. I hope they do more 31st century Trek, and that Saru’s in it.
I also have another poem shortly coming out with Stanza Cannon, who previously published my poem ‘the trees – the forest – the trees – the forest’, so that’s something to look forward to.
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