November 2010

Here is my November “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” List.  You’ll find a lot of things on it for school.  In fact, if not for all the SF laced between required readings, you might think I was a pretty serious person.

1. Continental Drift by Russell Banks.  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.  I am also writing a research paper about silence and racism in this novel.
2. Inverted World by Christopher Priest.  By the author of The Prestige, this novel will bend your mind.  Helward Mann joins the Guild to keep the city of Earth continually moving on its tracks, reaching toward that mysterious location called optimum.
3. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde.  Book two in the Thursday Next series and more hilarious, if possible, than book one.
4. Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow.  For my pedagogy class.
5. Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison.  For my Banks research paper.
6. Affliction by Russell Banks.  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.
7. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini.  If you like swashbuckling and the French Revolution, this novel about Andre-Louis is the best kind of Romantic.
8. The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard.  If you wanted more The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, read this Dutch translation about an antiquarian library hiding a secret society of powerful readers called Lectors.
9. Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov/Dec 2010.  Buy the magazine for the first time.  Fall in love with the magazine.  Ask for a subscription to the magazine for Christmas.
10. Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus.  Basil is the Sherlock Holmes of the mouse world, but will he be able to rescue the missing twins?  Read the basis for the animated film The Great Mouse Detective.
11. Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett.  Terry Pratchett’s books always make me happy, especially if they have Sam Vimes in them.
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.  This one has now displaced The Dispossessed as my favorite Le Guin novel because I’ve read it more recently.
13. Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer.  For my pedagogy class.

Best read of the month: Inverted World ties with Basil of Baker Street.

Funniest read of the month:  Thursday Next ties with Feet of Clay.

Best reread of the month:  The Left Hand of Darkness.

Best non-Le Guin reread of the month:  Scaramouche.

Worst read of the month:  Affliction ties with Where Men Win Glory.

I’m about to start reading All Clear, the second half of Blackout by Connie Willis.  Except that I have two final projects, one due on the eighth, one due on the sixteenth, and neither completed, alas.  I wish there were more days at the beginning of December so I could squeeze in one or two 500-page novels between writing for class.  They would improve my mood, and my mood needs improving.

*goes off to grumble at composition theory*

November 11

In September, I posted the first draft of a book review.  For devotees of literary criticism constructed on comparing early and final versions of the same work, here it is again, polished and shortened by almost 400 words.

*

Each of the stories in Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro desires to be a novel but needs another two hundred pages to justify its style, pace, and tone.  In Ishiguro’s novel-length works, the narrator gradually grows less reliable by the page, avoiding or denying a situation from the past.  Thus, when the narrator’s secret fear or true self finally shows itself, the revelation is as fascinating and surprising as well-placed grace notes or a triumphal choral ending.  However, in Nocturnes, the final poignant conclusions simply require more time and space to gather a greater level of emotional significance.

As suggested by the collection’s subtitle, the main characters all have an overt connection to music—one is a guitarist in a Venetian piazza, for instance, and another is known among his friends for his insightful musical taste.  The theme of nightfall, on the other hand, seems to have less to do with setting but instead plainly symbolizes the characters’ emotions, ages, or careers.  For the most part, these characters have reached the end of their musical potential, a fact that imbues the storytelling tone with melancholy as the characters realize they are winding down to the coda.

In “Crooner,” the Venetian guitarist agrees to accompany the legendary crooner Tony Gardner while the singer serenades his wife for the last time; nightfall here is figurative of the couple’s marriage.  “Come Rain or Come Shine” depicts a similarly discouraging situation: a middle-aged EFL teacher named Ray becomes involved in his friends’ marital problems while visiting them in England.  Despite the connections they revive over music, Ray believes that the bond he feels with his friends is transitory at heart.  In “Malvern Hills,” the dreams of a young composer are cast in a naïve and hopeless light by career musicians, and the title story “Nocturnes” depicts a jazz musician who believes he has compromised his high artistic ideals by undergoing plastic surgery to revive his career.  The unnamed piazza guitarist returns to narrate the final story “Cellists,” which follows the collapse of a professional musician’s reputation as a result of his receiving lessons from a woman who claimed to be a virtuoso but had not played the cello for decades.  As a whole, these stories are characterized by protagonists who fail to achieve their dreams, make human connections, or live up to their potentials.

Although three of the stories share minor characters, the themes are what helps the storylines connect.  Careers, friendships, dreams, ideals, and above all music grow near to their ends in sometimes less than satisfactory ways.  Ishiguro’s technical skill at writing is as elegant and well-phrased as the best piece of music; but these stories can seem incomplete, as if they are surrounded by a hundred or more invisible pages in which Ishiguro has developed all of the characters, added many more scenes and even points of view, and grounded the situation in what is missing most: context.  If any one of these stories became its own novel, this reader would be delighted to make the emotional investment, but out of these five long stories, none provided an adequate return for my time.  Instead, the feints at a fuller narrative can feel dissatisfying, and the leitmotif of nightfall ultimately turns back upon itself.

October 2010

And here’s a belated “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” post.  While I’m sorry to sadden the blogosphere by my extended hiatus from posting and commenting, the reading has still gone on.

1. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett.  Finally out in paperback, this newest Discworld novel does not disappoint.  The wizards of the Unseen University decide, for the purposes of maintaining a grant by which they purchase about 80% of their food, to play football.
2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.
3. Writing/Teaching by Paul Kameen.  For my pedagogy class.
4. Divine Endurance by Gwenyth Jones.  This was quite a strange book; it seemed to be about two different stories, that of the girl Cho, an android/robot designed to grant wishes, and those of the rebels whom she meets.
5. The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (50%).  This book was supposed to be a funny, clever steampunk mystery.  It wasn’t.
6. Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle.  Sandy and Dennys, Meg’s “normal” twin brothers, finally get their own book in the Time Quartet.  And the time they go to is not what you’d expect.
7. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.
8. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks (55%).  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.  Fortunately at the 55% point, this book was removed from the syllabus due to time constraints.  So I didn’t finish it, and don’t expect to.
9. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.  Thursday Next makes me happy.  This is the beginning of my Thursday Next rereading campain.  Join me and conquer the world!
10. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  For my Cormac McCarthy/Russell Banks class.
11. The Sense of Learning by Ann E. Berthoff.  For my pedagogy class.
12. Bryant & May off the Rails by Christopher Fowler.  More happy, zany mysteries.  Bryant and May Book 8.
13. Flight by Sherman Alexie.  I read this book before I went to hear Sherman Alexie speak.  The reading took exactly ninety minutes, as I’d predicted.

So I’m sorry that one fourth of my reading this semester was Cormac McCarthy and that just under half of it was for class.  On the other hand, Pratchett, L’Engle, Fforde, and Fowler made my reading month very happy, light, funny, and fun.  Thanks, you guys.