Let's Talk Books

I'm on a bit of a reading binge these days -- a sort of defiance of the general zeitgeist of distraction, hysteria and just general shitshow stuff. 

Reading, I've said many times, is my only constant.

I've just started Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God. It's too early to say whether I love it or not, but I'm having a rocky start given the genre. I'm not a person who enjoys the dystopian novel or even fantasy, so it might be hard going. We'll see (or read). I just finished Cynthia Bond's novel Ruby which was lying around my house for many years. It has some amazing lyrical passages in it, but overall I found it overwrought. Obviously, this is subjective, but as I get older I find that I like things stripped down to the essential. Lisa Halliday's novel Asymmetry was riveting for me, a kind of meta-fiction thing going on (shoot me now for even using the word meta) and stripped of sentimentality. I found the story really interesting and sexy and was blown away by the structure and writing. Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied Sing was perhaps the most beautiful book I've read in years -- brutal, spare, lyrical and transcendent at once. If you look over there on my righthand side-bar, you'll see a list of all the books I've read so far this year -- when I glance at it, I'd say that Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied Sing and Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon were my favorites. Quatro is one of those writers who appears to have been living in my brain taking notes.

Up next, after the Erdrich, is poet Robert Hass' A Little Book of Form and maybe simultaneously Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. I'm also making my way through a pile of New Yorkers.

Reader, what are you reading?

Post Easter Melancholy, Robert Burton and Language, Really Great Literature

This post is dedicated to my comrades in epilepsy arms but might amuse anyone

Much of today was spent like this:

I guess there's something to be said for staying in one's pajamas nearly all day, reading two collections of short stories -- one by George Saunders and the other by Jamie Quatro -- and allowing both of my sons to play video games all day and to somewhat neglect my daughter. Both books were so fantastic that I was nearly yanked out of my Easter Sunday melancholy, but not quite. I'm feeling obsessed by the Quatro book in particular and am sorry that I finished it. I won't tell you what the short stories are about but think infidelity, sex, religion, the south, Flannery O'Connor weirdness and you'll have some idea. It might be my Every Five Years Or So Book.**

Speaking of literature, I got this email and thought to make it just one post, titled The Bastardization of Language.

Reader, why?

I suppose the definition of literature might include those writings of scientific or medical interest, but the literature on pediatric antiepileptic drugs? To be read on Easter Sunday when in a state of melancholy? Speaking of melancholy, even Robert Burton, the esteemed writer of the seventeenth century titled his tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. That was in 1621. 

If Robert Burton were to have written a book about pediatric anti-epileptic drugs, I figure he'd title it something like The Anatomy of Hell, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Side Effectes, False Prognostickes, and Never a Cure for the Epilepsies. In One Thousand Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, The Braine Opened and Fucked Up.




**I read pretty voraciously -- sometimes up to fifty books a year, not counting poetry and The New Yorker, but it's only every five years or so that I read a novel that knocks me out. The last one I can remember doing so was Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, and that was in late 2009, so it's a little early to be counting it, but I Want to Show You More might be a contender.