Reading for August, 2005
You know how sometimes you just try to read too many clumsy books in a row and lose all reading momentum? I think I’ll call this “reader’s block”, and here’s hoping I’m not the only person in the world who has had this experience.
It is hard to say when it started. I’ve been working on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which is… very long. After four hundred pages, Clyde still hasn’t killed Roberta.
Then there was the disaster of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. For statistical purposes, Florida considers medicine and law as creative practices. They aren’t part of the “super creative core”, however. Whatever. I don’t need a fake book to affirm my creative impulses. But to be fair, you can ignore my opinion, I didn’t come close to reading the whole book.
The Rise of the Something Somthing
I tried to read The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Florida is a statistician who noticed some “interesting” correlations when looking at urban data mixed with social and occupational data. So he wrote a book. A very repetitive and anecdotal book about the rise of a “creative class”, a class which completely defies any statistical or sensible definition, as its members do not have any particular economic status, geographic history, social characteristics, or occupational grouping other than being professional and [mostly] not in the service industry. Search and replace “creative” with any other adjective and you’d have an equally weighty argument for your own rising (and nonexistent) class.
I hear Florida is making a career on the lecture circuit. He must have a dynamic personality.
Reading for July, 2005
It turns out The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler has no plot. Oh, there are a handful of scenes in which characters interact, and things happen off-stage, but this is all “get to know the character” stuff, which culminates in… Fowler’s collection quotes of other authors talking about Jane Austen.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The writing is at times poetic, but the narrative structure is haphazard, evasively moving towards “the big secret” which lends little momentum to the story. But don’t mind my opinion, this book has already made it only college reading lists where it will hover for a while before getting pushed aside for other things…
Reading for June, 2005
June reading:
Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields
The Box Garden by Carol Shields
These are the first two novels written by Shields. There are some related characters in the two books, but each story stands by itself. I found Small Ceremonies to be more appealing, mostly because, like the novel I wrote for last year’s NaNoWriMo, it deals with a main character who has just written a failed novel and is trying to figure out what to do next. I suppose there are some writers who are self-conscious about writing, and some not at all.
Reading for May, 2005
In the past month, I read:
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995. I think Larry’s Party is an even better novel, which was the first book I read by Shields. She had a gift for cosmic comedy. In case you don’t know, she died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 68.
Thinks Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I picked this one off of the “popular library” shelf at the central library, the shelf where they have multiple copies of books which are commonly assigned to students. I see that there are some sequels.
The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett, number 87 on the Modern Library list. The main characters, Constance and Sophia, are wholly dull. One thing I will say for Bennett: he doesn’t disappoint your expectations because he never raises your expectations. And with this novel, I am at the 50/100 mark on the Modern Library list.
Abandoned novels:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize with her most recent novel. That book has a long hold queue at the library, so I picked this one up first. Full of sleepy prose, there is no real direction to the story, as far as I can tell after skimming through the second half. The story is set in a town on the edge of a glacial lake, and consequently fails to be relevant to the world of 1980, when it was written. Maybe, just maybe, there is a quirky arthouse screenplay in there, but who cares?
Reading for April, 2005
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Number 55 on the Modern Library list.
Golden Fool by Robin Hobb. The second book in the Tawny Man trilogy. I was glad to have this book with me at the MySQL conference.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
Current reading: The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett. Number 87 on the Modern Library list. Once I’ve finished this one I’ll be at the halfway mark. Then I think I’ll take a break from the Modern Library.
Reading for March, 2005
The Glass Hammer by K.W. Jeter. Reread.
Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb. The first book in the third trilogy by Hobb (who has also written several books under another name). Hobb is a solid fantasy writer; throughout the FitzChivalry Farseer books she uses a single voice for all the storytelling. There are too many writers out there who shift the narrative voice as it suits them, the worst offenders being those writers who like to “peek” into the mind of the villain / antagonist because they don’t know how else to move the story forward. Jasper Fforde’s /The Eyre Affair/ is a good example of this slovenly writing style.
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Reading for February, 2005
February is the shortest month.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. #17 on the Modern Library list. A haunting story full of tragedy. Some amazing characterizations, where you get to see the character from both the inside and the outside.
Reading for January, 2005
Here’s what I’ve been reading this past month:
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. #56 on the Modern Library list. Actually I may have read this in December. Speculation why book is on list: Sam Spade is an archetype private eye. This type of book is more important for its influences on cinema than for any literary qualities, a story that doesn’t claim any deep significance.
2004 in Review (books)
Best read, non-fiction: Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, 3rd edition, by Stan Gibilisco. Over the summer I spent a fair amount of time mucking around with a pile of resistors and capacitors, trying to make an LED flash. As a student, I took a lot of math classes, but the only physics class I ever had was as a high school junior, so now, many years later, I find there was actually a reason for learning how to do differential equations. Gibilisco’s book is a sizeable 800 pages, but well organized into short chapters for easy reading. If you’re trying to teach yourself electronics, I’d suggest getting both this book and Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims III. If you’re having difficulty figuring out something in one book, the other might have a better explanation.
Worst read, non-fiction: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, 1990. Comments here. Complete rubbish, made worse by the fact that the concept appeals to some academics.