If this had been the first book I'd ever read, I'd have never read another

I own exactly one book whose cover bears Oprah's golden seal of approval. I own this book because its author caused an uproar by politely declining his invitation into her sorority, was later snubbed by the Pulitzer and finally awarded the National Book Award. Thousands of covers had already been printed before he made his announcement, and I found them remaindered and couldn't bear to see them that way, so I bought one. I'm not a hater -- I love every single thing that Oprah has done for reading in America, save defacing perfectly good covers. And yes, I've read many of her selections, both before and after she chose them. But I've never read a one whose cover bore her name.

I had to explain this to the good folks at Borders the Saturday before last: that I needed a copy of The Pillars of the Earth but that if the only ones they had were Oprah's, they could go ahead and forget about it.

Here is how I came to read this book: I was dragging my feet in finishing Brideshead and freaking out about what would come next. There was this real sense of urgency (not uncommon for me) in needing to know what I would console myself with once Brideshead was done. As I said before, it was Saturday, and naturally, I was watching non-stop coverage of the Olympics, like any other legitimate American. The men's road race was on at the time, and as I watched the peloton slowly climb into the mountains above Beijing, nearing the Great Wall, I was overcome with the desire to read a huge novel that dealt with people who were swept up in something larger than life. And because I don't know of anything off the top of my head that's about the Great Wall itself, and it seemed like too much effort to google or wiki anything, I settled on Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. It had a very pretty cover and a lovely title and was about something that strikes me as infinitely fascinating -- building a medieval cathedral. Plus, I was under the impression that it was a really good book and had been wanting to read it for a longish time.

So, off I went. The prologue held my attention. I felt, if not affection, a certain interest in the initial characters. It wasn't great writing by any means, but it was simple and it was solid, and I thought, maybe the writing will begin to take shape with the cathedral itself.

My rule is that before I allow myself to abandon them, I give troublesome books 100 pages.

And I would have really appreciated it if Pillars's editor would have given me the same courtesy. But if there ever was an editor, it seems they didn't make it out of the gate. I am trying so hard to like this monster, but right now, I'm galled by it.

For starters (and this was my first clue) it had like three (three!) endorsements in the opening pages. Three. The book was published almost a decade ago and was (even before Oprah's magic wand) Ken Follett's best-selling work, and they could only come up with three endorsements? Secondly, the book opens with the Prologue and then Part One followed by Chapter 1 (as in the number). Chapter 1 the number is followed by II, as in the Roman numeral. Which is then followed by III, IV and V. These are followed by Chapter 2. Which is then followed by II and III and so on. Am I missing something? Is this some literary device I'm ignorant of? Is it really so hard to stick with one or the other?

One reviewer I'd read had commented on the novel's gratuitous sex and how it was slightly off putting. I rarely find sex gratuitous and think mostly, what we need is more of it in fiction. (Or in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. Please?) But the first sex scene in this book is so cringe-awful that I will not even dignify it with a spoiler alert. Don't ask me what Ken Follett was thinking when he had a woman semi rape a starving, half-dead-with-grief man in a clearing in the forest, while his recently motherless children slept nearby. And let's not forget that this man is still covered in his dead wife's blood, that she isn't 12 hours in the ground, that he's just committed infanticide and likely hasn't showered in months or brushed his teeth in, I don't know, ever? It doesn't matter how barking horny you are, or how the security of the rest of your life depends on seducing this one man, no one, not even a two dimensional stock character, does this.

It gets worse.

After this grotesque coupling, Follett commits the cardinal sin. Exposition, exposition, exposition. He has a chance here to make another play for me, the reader, by showing and not telling. We've been told for the past 100 pages. All's I want is to be shown a little bit. Instead, Follett writes: "Tom was no less bemused. Life was moving too fast for him to take in all the changes. It was like being on the back of a runaway horse: everything happened so quickly that there was no time to react to events, and all he could do was hold on tightly and try to stay sane." After this little gem, where he's stated the same thing multiple times, Follett then gives us a play-by-play of all the changes that have just happened so fast to poor Tom. Because, presumably, we weren't paying attention when we were told the first time.

And then! Then we find out that the baby has really lived. Zing! It didn't die in the forest on its mother's grave after all! Previously, before the baby is left to die, it is twice described as having dark luxurious hair, like its dead mother's. Two or three pages later, the baby is bald. Look, I don't care if the kid has flying squirrels growing out of it's skull, just be consistent. If you make a point to tell us something about a character, stick with it.

Also, within the first 164 pages the phrase "hot body" appears. Twice. Just to be clear: the phrase "hot body" has no place in historical fiction.

And yet, I think I could get over all of this. The abysmal writing. The weird chapter numbering. The creepy sex. I could look past it if the characters were in any way engaging or compelling. If they weren't dull as hell. The other cardinal rule of writing? Never bore the reader. Derrick Jensen has told his writing students that they ought to aim to write things that are so good he'd rather read them than make love. Well. I would rather engage in the kind of horrifying sex act I just described than read another page of this beast.

OMG, I'm so depressed at how much I don't like this book. And I have over 900 pages to go.

At least I have Michael Phelps.

Ed. Note: there were four endorsements, not three as I had remembered. BFD.

Twilight, twilight, in the end

This week has been rough. One of the lesser loved weeks in my grand 2008. It began with a death in the family and seems now to have ended with a death in the family (of sorts). I've been maintaining level with Hem, and actually, have finished. The True Post continues to gather strength in my head, but until then, I give you:

"Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer

(read in the hours of 11am and 12:30am, dates August 9 -10)

If you're looking for candy, I've got the hard stuff right here. Check out my 13 hour reading marathon, in which I watched Michael Phelps torpedo his way to win after win after win, and supplemented the repeat commercial interruptions with intense, racing reading of this young adult angst fest.

Now, if you know me, you know that i love, LOVE, the YA Fiction. Can't get enough of it. When it's done well, it gives you a nice clear picture of life and the hard choices we all have to make at some point. And even when it's done poorly, you've probably only spent a weekend reading and so don't feel as though you've wasted much time.

Twilight falls somewhere in between. I didn't spend long on the 300+ pages, and so I feel like I've come out on top. A bit of a belly ache however, as the teenage love drama was so intense at times, I texted Jones about midway through, "I feel as though I'm actively reliving my 16 year old romance to my first love, the painter/musician." Regardless, Twilight was everything I was looking for in a novel that lazy and emotionally wrung Saturday afternoon.

We meet Bella, short for Isabella, early in the novel as an awkward yet engaging 17 yr old who is moving to the Pacific Northwest, land of green and moist and unsurprisingly, vampires. We follow her to high school, listen half heartedly to all of the troubles that attend a new student, and then, speaking as a female who cannot get enough of the star crossed lovers, engage rapturously when she falls in love with the brilliant and dynamic Edward Cullen, a 17 year old with dazzling topaz eyes and burnished golden hair.

The novel moves slowly through their romance, then speeds up into the necessary difficulties of teenage love, and finally, in a whirlwind climax, hurls you through a cataclysmic ending with the promise of more to come. Three more books to come, in fact, as well as a Major Motion Picture.

I'll be interested to see who plays Edward, seeing as Ms. Meyers has written him in the exact form and character as Adonis. Until then, I will probably go pick up the next three books in the quad-rilogy, and suggest that if you have a lazy emotional Saturday coming up, you do the same.

Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh

Two weeks ago, I first saw the sumptuous trailer for Brideshead Revisited and thought, Mother of Pearl, I'm gonna have to read that beast in the next six days. This, not one day after I'd bought 5 other books that were lounging on my bedside table, waiting to be read, in addition to the 4 I'm currently reading. But I've been meaning to read Brideshead for about a decade, and I can't see the film before I do, and I want to see the film ASAP. So there you have it.

Brideshead is one of those books that's been shelved in a mental library alongside other titles that have been recommended to me by Readers -- those whose own literary tastes and conquests I both admire and envy. I seemed to remember a relative of mine (the one who is a somewhat renowned Joycean scholar) encouraging me to read Brideshead, but when I pulled up the email, what she'd actually said was that the novel, "finally, isn't all that good." Now, on this, we disagree. Mightily. For what I felt, in the handful of hours that it took me to barrel through this book, was rapture.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps.

But I honestly had no clue what to expect from this book, and feared that I too would find it not all that good. Rather, I was almost giddy to discover Charles Ryder. I haven't fallen so hard for a narrator since Nick Carraway.

Here is as much as I can tell you: the novel takes place in England (with jaunts to Venice and Paris and Morocco) in between the two World Wars. Charles Ryder, a middle-class, aspiring artist, comes to Oxford to read history. There, he meets and (presumably) falls in love with Lord Sebastian Flyte, the charming but haunted youngest son of a fading English dynasty. Sebastian's attempts to keep Charles away from his family ultimately fail, and if you want to get overly simplistic, you could say that once Charles's path crosses with the rest of the Flyte family, the wheels of their downfall are set in motion. Only, Waugh doesn't ultimately believe in downfall (at least not for the the main characters), and seeks to suffuse everyone's experience ultimately with grace. Whether you find Waugh's version of grace in line with your own (I don't), or even in line with what you'd like to see happen to these characters is beside the point. The point is that Waugh is a damn fine writer.

Here:

Charles's decision to go and formally meet Sebastian: I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Or this, shortly after Ryder's acquaintance with the Flytes: But I was as untouched by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather, I was touched by both alike. I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist -- only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.

Do not let me misrepresent Charles Ryder, he is not all soliloquy. I jotted down the page numbers of dozens of these passages and phrases (and as I flip through them now, I am compelled to turn off the Olympics and begin the whole brilliant mess again) but if I don't rein myself in now, it'll be too late.

Three things that were evident nearly immediately in this book: that I would miss it sorely when it was finished. That it would be finished too soon. And that (even now, after a few days to think it over) I would be hard pressed to come up with another author whose panoply of characters are so alive. There is a largish cast here. And it seems the secondaries were never let in on their second-class status. Waugh has written each one so completely and effortlessly and lovingly that I should nearly expect to bump into them were I to find myself in London or Paris or Venice or Morocco during those in between years.

It's hard to speak in any more real detail about this book without spoiling it. It is a tragicomedy. And a love story. And then a second love story. There is a moral imperative, which I find neither moral nor imperative, but am perfectly satisfied with nonetheless. It was a delight to read.

As soon as I finished it, I sent a text to Martin that said: Just finished Brideshead. Right now, at this very moment, the thought of ever reading another book again feels like adultery.

I don't have much higher praise than that.

Still reading list-less

A few years ago, I lived on a farm. In a barn. And it was great. Greater than great. I don't know that I've ever been happier anywhere else. I shared the barn with a world-class roommate, my two mutts and, towards the end, the man I was seeing at the time. One of the dogs, the larger and more neurotic one, had for years up until the arrival of the boyfriend, always slept either underneath my bed, or right beside me on the floor. But I wasn't the only one who had fallen in love. Simply put, that dog positively adored my boyfriend. He took to him in a way he's never taken to anyone else in my life. He not only began sleeping on the boyfriend's side of the bed, but he'd wait up for him. Patiently seated before the front door until our little family was all home, refusing to be settled in for the night until his new master was tucked in as well.

Eventually, the boyfriend and I parted ways over several irreconcilable differences. And he soon moved out of the barn, the city, the state, this region of the country.

His absence was made all the more palpable by how badly my dog took this turn of events. He was unmoored. Confused. Frustrated with me. He trotted back and forth from my bedroom to the front door, wearing a path. He refused to come to bed. He wined incessantly, he barked at the door. He would come back to the room to investigate, surmise the boyfriend was still gone, and go back to the door for the night, settling down in front of it and letting out the weariest of sighs. It was weeks before he would sleep in the bedroom again, and months before he finally let go, and moved back to my side of the bed.

Sometime later, I thought to myself, This must be what I'm like to live with, immediately after I finish a really spectacular book. Moody, anxious, sad, unsure what to do next.

This was how I reacted after I finished The Kite Runner. I hadn't slept for three nights, sitting up in the TV room, listening to the Brokeback Mountain score and reading it. My roommate came home the last night to find me crying so hard I couldn't breathe, the music cranked, and me pacing around the apartment in mad little circles. She immediately thought someone had died, and was more than slightly amused that it was "just a book." (A book that she would soon have a similar reaction to.) The days following the end of Kite Runner, I didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't read, I couldn't sleep very well, I was full of a beautiful sadness, that colored every moment of the days. This kind of intensity passes. No one, not even dogs, can hold on to this kind of emotion for very long.

But each time, I am thankful for it. I am thankful for the books that have made me feel so broken and also so alive. I don't want to read only these kinds of books. It'd be too exhausting. But each time, I despair that it will be the last time.

I have come nowhere close to drawing up a reading list that I'm happy with. But I do so hope that one or two or three of the titles will turn out to be the right kind of magic, and leave me utterly bereft and tired and satisfied in their wake.

Waiting for the Feast...

As the title suggests, much like Jones and Tweed (hello Tweed), "A Moveable Feast" remains elusive. I'm a little farther along today than I was yesterday, and plan to finish it probably tonight. But because of the hype, and since the title of this little blog is dedicated to Hem, I feel as though I should put off the True First, and begin with a warm up blog piece. Therefore, I give you:

"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

(Date Read - July 18 thru 22, primarily in bed before sleep)

Here is what I found after reading my first Cormac. (I love that name. Cormac. I'll read his books just so I can say his name out loud. "I'm reading a Cormac." Anyway.) Maybe it's because I'm reading Hemingway, but I noticed Cormac's style of writing much quicker than I caught onto the plot. It's so spare, so terse, so devoid of Author (in fact, it's SO devoid of Author, you almost can't help but be overcome by Cormac's presence) that I had a hard time getting ahold of the story.

When I first approached the book, I thought I'd be reading a heavy weight, an author's author full of DeLillo-ish phrases and drawn out back country descriptions. And to some extent, that is there. But it's not in your face, and it's not obnoxious.

When Cormac writes Sherriff Bell bemoaning the loss of a generation of kindness and gentleness, I remembered the words of Hem in the chapter, "Une Generation Perdue." Cormac writes of the generation of the 1980s as those who have lost their way, and points to his earlier comrades in the WWII era as being all grace and eloquence. But the term was popularized by Hemingway, quoting Gertrude Stein, who referenced it towards the youth of WWI.

Perhaps the line most fitting for thinking about loss is this one given by Bell after seeing the carnage in the desert. "I just have this feelin we're looking at something we really aint never even seen before." It's not so much that Bell is looking at the scenes unfolding around him and mourning the generation he just left. No, he has his own mixed emotions about his time as a boy soldier. It's that he knows the world is moving forward and is leaving him behind. He's not sorry to be left behind. He's sorry that the world has come to this.

The title of No Country comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats. The first stanza goes something like this:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

It's an interesting poem for Cormac to choose, for such a title, and with such a storyline. Yeats seems to be reacting to the plenty and youth of a rich era, saying that this is no place to be old and frail. You must have movement in a lush country. You must have vigor and stamina and be able to enjoy the abundance of the earth.

Cormac's country is about as far from Byzantium as Yeats can get. It is nearly lawless, spare and desert-like, full of violence and bloodshed and acts of rationalized psychopathetic lunacy. It is not a country for old men, not because of the need for vigor and vitality to enjoy, but rather because it is only the loss of something that enables the youth to survive within it. Old men have died off in this country because they cannot stand the loss. Young men die off in this country, because they cannot live with the loss. Bell will die soon and leave Chigurh as one of the sole survivors, he is who is the most empty. It is a doomed place.

...

I loved "No Country." I thought it was a frenetic, bloody story told by a kind hearted man sitting in a rocking chair. It was a story that was gritty to read all the way through, and it made that rough, spare voice that much more compelling. I love a story that makes me pause and think and wonder about the way of things. And more than anything, I love a story that sings.