Dan Schmidt's book diary: 1999

Unfortunately, I read a fairly significant portion of this book last year, as it was condensed and excerpted to create a story for the New Yorker. So I had an unfortunate sense of deja vu through much of it.

I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure how much someone who didn't know go would miss. The translator didn't seem to have a very good idea of how the game works. The score of the game itself is included; it's actually not a great game, by professional standards. But I suppose that isn't really the point.

But I don't know if it's just that it's the 90's or what, but the constant willful political-incorrectness made me wince over and over. I wasn't sure I would be able to get past the prologue, but I did okay afterwards. It was wildly overwritten too, but again, that calmed down after the beginning. I may try another Roth to see if he's always like this.

Some of it was fascinating, and the conclusions at the end were interesting, but I have to admit that often my eyes glazed over at some of the sociological explanations of what was going on. I'd be interested to see what Latour's straight nonfiction is like.

Anyway, as far as the actual novel goes, it was short, exciting, and interesting, although a hackneyed concentration camp segment rang false; I felt like Maurensig was a bit over his head there. He has a new novel out, which is getting good reviews.

The story itself was an interesting genre of magical realism, and the plot was good, but the author kept annoying me. For one thing, I was constantly aware that he was Telling A Grand Story, which obviously was intentional, but rubbed me the wrong way; it made me feel like he thought I was twelve.

The more disturbing thing was the implicit politics. It's largely the good, smart, noble, moral, beautiful people vs. the evil, stupid, silly, ugly people. The second category of people (I'm thinking specifically of the editor of the rival newspaper; I can't remember names right now) were drawn as such caricatures that I felt sorry for them. I felt like I was reading a Wagner libretto.

Anyway, it was definitely well-written, and I got through the whole thing, but as a whole it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

(By the way, now that I've read this, the new #1 entry in the list of books that everyone who knows my tastes says I must read is The Name of the Rose.)

Every detail is beautifully set, and the whole adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. This is the kind of understated writing I would have liked to have seen in the Kawabata; you're left to sort out the epiphanies yourself, but each moment is full of meaning. Eh, I'm not making any sense at all. But reading this was just a very fulfilling experience.

A man is torn between two women, and tries to come to grips with his capacity for doing evil. The protagonist is drawn disturbingly sympathetically. I've seen a few people complain about the translation, but it seemed fine to me.

Harkleroad's no professional writer, but that's not really the point. Plenty of anecdotes, plenty of comments on individual songs. Highly recommended for all Beefheart fanatics.

It was pretty interesting, and Dibbell didn't get much technical stuff wrong, which is a welcome relief. I felt he kind of overdid the sensationalistic aspects, but I suppose that's what you do when you write a book. Apparently most of the actual MOOers don't like it very much, which is probably not too surprising.

I liked it, though I usually don't go for this telling-not-showing mythological kind of exposition. It certainly made me even more impressed by Tolkien's creative abilities. The main problem was getting confused by all the names; people (and elves) who are related tend to have very similar names, and it became very difficult to keep track of who's who. Reading about the legends of the world definitely did increase my enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings when I read that next.

I had mixed feelings about the book. There were lots of wacky things going on but it had difficulty keeping me interested. It's set in a just-barely-parallel world, the point of which I didn't really see. Halfway through the book the style turns strange; for example, Rushdie abruptly stops using quote marks to delineate conversation.

The descriptions of the world of rock music never seemed quite right either. I guess all I'm doing is complaining about it, but it certainly wasn't bad. I think you have to be in a verbal-pyrotechnics kind of mood to read Rushdie, and I wasn't at the time, really.

I liked it. It was a real page-turner, and the characters were interesting. In fact, that's the main problem many people seem to have with it. The 'good guys' have a lot of faults, and the main 'bad guy' is depicted very sympathetically, so by the end you don't know who to root for. By the end of the book, it's unclear whether Kay is aware of all of this and being really tricky about whether the ending is happy or sad, or whether he's just totally clueless and tacking on a genre-standard ending that ignores everything he set up earlier. I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, which you kind of have to do to make the ending literarily satisfying.

The Book of the New Sun has already jumped into my top ten list, along with Tolstoy and Pynchon and Proust. It's that good. How do I describe it? I guess I just did, a little. The writing is magnificent; there are lots of little secrets buried between the lines, most of which you won't get until a second or third reading; there's an amazing sense of wonder; there's a timeless quality to the writing, as it often looks back to models such as Homer (there are many stories within stories, for example).

It takes a little while to get into. And you have to totally surrender to Wolfe's sense of plot-time. Often you go into a chapter thinking it's going to cover around one day, and then something happens, and then something happens within that, and this day you thought you were about to see the end of doesn't die until over a hundred pages later. Very Proustian that way, actually. You're 80% of the way through the book, as the narrator has reached the front of the big war and you're all prepared for a Big Climax, when everything is put aside for fifty pages so some people can engage in a story-telling contest. It's that kind of book.

But it all works, amazingly, and all the digressions you got annoyed at early on turn out to be totally relevant, in the same way that all your organs do something to keep you alive, even the weird-looking ones, and even your appendix somehow fits. Read it, please, and try not to bring too many expectations about how stories work, because it'll just bog you down until you get used to the style here.

We're back to mysterious first-person narration, so much so that it's not even clear that the narrator is really the same person as the protagonist. The book alternates between the present (from the narrator's viewpoint) and the past, explaining just enough to make you think that maybe you can figure it out on your own. The next two volumes are both due out next year; I can't wait.

It's all good fun in a British comedy-of-manners style -- I was reminded of The Importance Of Being Earnest a lot -- and both the plot and the characterizations are top-notch. Extremely enjoyable, don't you know.

So, fun, but I think I'm going to go with another novel next, and I'll take a bit of a break from Wodehouse to avoid overdosing.

It's basically all plot; there are three different mysteries going on, all at different time periods, and it's confusing trying to keep track of all of them. Unfortunately for me, sort of, I was reading so carefully (because I knew I'd have to) that I figured out all the details of the main murder as soon as it occurred, and then spent the rest of the book rolling my eyes as the protagonist kept trying false hypothesis after false hypothesis. Then at the end you get told the real solution anyway, so I didn't even get the satisfaction of saying "I know the real answer and all these other readers don't." Interestingly, I've seen some reviews that said the solution totally came out of thin air and wasn't set up at all, so go figure. It was good, but The Quincunx is his masterpiece, so that's the one you should read if you haven't read any Palliser.

I've been thinking about what kind of writing I like. I like action, but not so much the action of people doing things as much as the action of people talking, or thinking. I tend to read kind of fast, so I skim over descriptions; when I read books with a big action sequence at the end, I often find myself losing the thread of exactly what's going on where. When there's lots of descriptive text, my eyes have to slow way down to catch everything, and I lose my reading rhythm. This also happens when I encounter long lists of things.

The writing in The Emigrants is excellent, but it's description-heavy; I'd turn the page and see another two pages of descriptive-text and sigh a little. So I finished my vegetables, and they were good for me, but it wasn't my thing.

It was an excellent book, no surprise. I particularly liked the way that the narrator of the story isn't really the protagonist; he's observing all these goings-on and trying to make sense of them. The way that past history is gradually revealed is very effective as well. Things get a little melodramatic, but that's literature for you.

So this review has the highest ratio of book quality to review quality yet. Sorry about that. C'mon, it's The Great Gatsby. You don't need my recommendation.

The Language Instinct suffered a little (for me) from being just a bit too informal and nontechnical. This book was pitched at just the right level for me.

Still, it was well written and I'd like to read it again to pick up on some of the more esoteric connections. But I don't think I'd recommend it as an introduction to Wolfe, as some have.

The first series is great fun, perfect holiday reading. It's narrated in a very hard-boiled style, as opposed to the high-falutin' grand adventure with elves and faeries you may fear when you open a fantasy book. Nine brothers fight to rule the land that their father abandoned, and there's tons of secret plots and backstabbing and people who are not what they seem and so on; at least one huge surprise every book.

I enjoyed it a great deal, but I hear that the second series isn't nearly as good, so I may never get around to reading the other half of the book.