I read The Moviegoer when I was in high school, and I hated it, though I knew I should have liked it. For years, I've claimed not to be a fan of Southern lit in general - with exceptions like A Confederacy of Dunces and, more recently, Faulkner. I'm not sure why I don't like it. Maybe it's because I hear the words in my head with a heavy southern drawl.

Anyway, months ago, I decided to give The Moviegoer a second try, and I finally got around to it. I remembered almost nothing about it, but I had a feeling I'd like it more now. The protagonist is exactly my age, 29 and about to turn 30, and he has a lot of the general life issues that I have, so I can totally empathize with him. Here's an example:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The problem with The Moviegoer is that it bored me. I wasn't bored to put it down, but I wasn't excited to read it, either. Maybe it's the drawl drifting through my head - I don't know - but I just couldn't get into it. Walker Percy just isn't my kind of writer.

On a more interesting note, I've now read as many books this year as I did in all of 2010. I was on quite a bender, but then I started messing with the Thesis Monster again, and Palmer got me hooked on Warcraft, which is much more fun than you might think it would be. I'll still hit the big 5-0, just you wait. I'm glad I got ahead in January and February.

I tried reading Watership Down several years ago and failed. I remembered what happened more than halfway through the novel, so I'm surprised I didn't just finish it. It is long, though. And it's totally worth a read. I really enjoyed it, though reading from a rabbit's point of view took a bit of getting used to. The novel is about rabbits starting their own warren and the Things that Happen. It's amazingly violent - much more than I thought it would be. I haven't seen the movie (or if I have, it's been a really long time), but I bet it sticks pretty close to the novel's plot. And Adams is great at imagery. I felt like I was in the warren with the rabbits.

The first time I tried to read Watership Down, I lived in Mid City, New Orleans. It was probably a year or two before the hurricane. My condo wasn't in the best neighborhood, but it wasn't terrible, either. Except a girl named Ashley lived next to me, and she sold prescription drugs, so ne'er-do-wells were often about, yelling up to her window. "AshLEY!" Urgh. Anyway, I was sitting in a recliner next to a window that looked out to my small patio. It had a privacy fence a good bit taller than me. I heard a noise, and a dude I assumed to be one of AshLEY's "friends" jumped over my fence, grabbed my bicycle, shoved it over the fence, and jumped back over. Goodbye to my bike. Not that I really rode it or anything. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat really still and watched him. I figured it'd be a bad idea to try and confront him since the only thing between us was a thin pane of glass.

I don't really have a lot to say about this novel. I really liked it. There's also a Tales from Watership Down that I'll probably look into at some point. A novel about rabbits was certainly a change from what I've been reading lately.

I usually don't read books like The Silent Land, which fits squarely into the pop-fiction category. I found it through a Facebook ad that claimed it's like a Murakami novel. I was, of course, skeptical, but I downloaded it to my (new!) Kindle and gave it a try. It's was really short: I read it in four or five hours, and I read pretty slowly. It's about a couple skiing in Spain when they get caught by an avalanche. The husband digs out the wife, and they get down the mountain, but no one is there. The whole town is empty. At first, they think that the resort has been evacuated for fear of another avalanche, so they try to get out of town, but no matter what road they take, the always end up back there. The reader wonders if they're dead, which seems kind of obvious if you've ever seen Beetlejuice, or if something else is going on. The power starts going out, and time gets confused. In the end, it turns out that only one of them is dead, which is a bit of a twist, I guess.

Though The Silent Land is a predictable pop-fiction thriller, I really liked it. Graham Joyce's imagery is really good: it was one of those novels in which I found myself totally absorbed. I was even creeped out at times. I wanted to find out what was going on as much as the characters did, so I found myself reading through it really quickly just to find out what would happen next. It's totally worth a read.

I'd wanted to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell since I first saw it on bookshelves a few years ago. I didn't really know much about it except that it involved magicians but isn't really fantasy. Which meant to me that it might not suck. I had a feeling that I'd really like it, but I didn't even try reading it because it's so long. Like 900 pages long. In fact, if you count Lord of the Rings as three books, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the longest book I've ever read. But, you say, I have an English degree! Colleges don't assign long books anymore, so I wasn't in the habit. Even Lord of the Rings took me several months to read, and I was quite impressed with myself after finishing it.
Here's the most basic of summaries, as the plot is quite complex: In early ninetenth-century England, there is a society of magicians. They don't actually practice magic - they just study it. Someone gets to wondering why no one in England practices magic anymore, and a couple members if the society find the one magician who actually practices magic: Mr. Norrell. Mr. Norrell wants to get involved in the government, to help England in its war against France, but no one in politics seems to respect magic. He has a cousin in Parliament, Sir Walter Pole, who refuses to help him. Sir Walter's wife dies, though, and Mr. Norrell says he can bring her back to life, which he does, except he doesn't exactly know what he's doing. He asks a fairy, known as the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, to help him. The fairy makes a deal, saying he'll revive her as long as he gets half her life. Mr. Norrell thinks the fairy means that Lady Pole will only live for half her normal lifespan, but the actual deal is that Lady Pole will be spirited off to Faerie every night to dance in a ball, a captive of the fairy. So, since Mr. Norrell "helped" Lady Pole, he gets his foot in the door at Parliament and becomes involved in the war, using magic to defend England. Meanwhile, a younger man named Jonathan Strange stumbles into magic because nothing else interests him, and he eventually becomes Mr. Norrell's student. He learns quickly and then goes off to Belgium to fight in the war. At some point, the fairy decides he wants Strange's wife, Arabella, for his collection, so he charms a swamp log to look like her and then kidnaps her. The charm wears off after a few days, and it looks like Arabella is dead, though she is stuck in Faerie with Lady Pole. Then there are a few hundred pages of war and the like, and, somehow, it doesn't get boring. Eventually, Strange and Norrell separate, and since Norrell has hoarded all the magic books in England, Strange runs out of material to study. Not knowing what Norrell did with the fairy, he decides to summon his own fairy. The problem is that it's the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. The fairy refuses to help him, so Strange casts a spell and makes it to the fairy's mansion, and he sees his wife at the ball. The fairy curses him and sends him home, and he obsesses over getting his wife back, deliberately making himself crazy in the process. Eventually, he convinces Norrell to help him, and they team up again, fading off into magicland together.

And that's only the most skeletal of summaries.

I absolutely loved every minute of this novel. I was totally intimidated by its length, but it was so worth it. I was sad when it ended because Susanna Clarke had drawn me into a world I didn't want to leave. The funny thing is that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was her first novel. I can't wait to read the rest of them, though I have a feeling that after this one, I'll find myself disappointed.

I read The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken by accident, though I've been meaning to read it for years. I'd just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and was waiting for UPS to deliver The Savage Detectives, and I figured I'd read a couple of the stories. This collection includes my very favorite short story ever, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," so I thought I'd enjoy the rest of them. Once I started reading, I found myself enjoying the stories differently than I'd expected to. I thought they'd all be like "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," but they're not.

"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is about a boy, who, one morning in his bedroom, imagines that snow is falling. He hears the postman coming down the street as he always does, but his footsteps from the farthest house are muffled due to the snow. The boy gets up, looks out the window, and sees that there is, in fact, no snow at all. He becomes obsessed with the snow, hearing it in the mornings and imagining it all day, and he loses interest in real life. His parents and teacher are concerned, as his condition progresses very quickly. Every morning, he imagines the snow getting deeper and deeper, and he can only hear the postman when he gets closer and closer. Eventually, the boy recedes completely into his world of snow, oblivious to his parents and the real world around him.

I've always liked that story. I think I read it for the first time when I was in high school. I don't remember whether it was assigned or not or how I found out about it. I still have a copy of it from a library book. The funny thing is that I own the library book, now, and that's what I read. I don't remember how I got that, either. It's from the main branch of the Jefferson Parish Library, and I assume I got it from a book sale. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for years, waiting to be read.

And I like it most of the stories. I only really like two of them, though: "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" and "Mr. Arcularis," which is about a man taking a boat to Europe after surgery in the US. He meets a woman, and things turn out interestingly. Lots of stories in this collection are about failed love, and some, like "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," are about crazy people.

I did a bit of reading about Conrad Aiken, and it appears that love and insanity were some of his major concerns. Evidently, when he was a kid, his father went crazy and killed his mother. He was always afraid he would go crazy himself. And he was married three times. In an interview with The Paris Review, he said he was primarily a poet, but he started writing short stories for the money and decided he liked them. I don't think I've ever read one of his poems, and I'm not to interested in doing so. He was a friend of T.S. Eliot's and surprisingly influential in the literary world in the 1920s and 1930s.

I don't see myself revisiting Aiken, though I enjoyed the stories. I'll probably stumble across "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" or "Mr. Arcularis" again, but his other work doesn't interest me.

My original plan for this blog was 50 novels in a year, but a friend recommended and loaned me Julia Child's My Life in France. It sounded interesting enough, and though I'm usually not one for nonfiction, I figured I'd give it a try. My Life in France is an "autobiography" about Julia Child's years in France when she decided she loved cooking and went to the Cordon Bleu, etc, etc. I put "autobiography" in quotes because her nephew, Alex Prud'homme, actually wrote the book. From the forward, written by Prud'homme:

For a few days every month, I'd sit in her living room asking questions, reading from family letters, and listening to her stories. At first I taped our conversations, but when she began to poke my take recorder with her long fingers, I realized it was  distracting her, and took notes instead. (x)

Yeah, that's not autobiography, and after I read the forward, I almost decided not to read the book at all. But, even though it's written by someone else, I really enjoyed it much more than I imagined I would. There's something exciting about it, and after seeing Julie and Julia, which I also liked immensely, I wanted to hear the real story. It seems that lots of the bad stuff was glossed over, like tension between Julia and Louisette when the latter wasn't really helping with the cookbook, and Julia had her name removed as an author. That said, My Life in France is an inspiring look into Julia Child's life that made me want to drink more wine, at the very least - and keep a diary (at which I'm generally terrible) because it'd be nice to look back after many years and remember little things, like fantastic meals, that I enjoyed.

The Savage Detectives is kind of a hard read. It's also really, really long. It's also worth getting through. I'm not sure how I came across it, though Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has been on my radar for quite some time. I haven't tackled it yet because it's even longer than this one. Until recently, I've never been a fan of long books, probably because I was conditioned in college to read short ones quickly. Longer books, though, like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, are steadily growing on me.

The Savage Detectives is split into three parts. The first is somewhere under two hundred pages, and it's a nice, easy read. It's generally about this early college-age kid, Juan Garcia Madero, who fancies himself a poet and joins a sort-of movement in Mexico called the visceral realists. He meets other people, some of whom are poets and others who pretend to be poets, and Things Happen. The most important of these other characters, we figure out later, are Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano. They end up running off withe Garcia Madero and a prostitute named Lupe. Then we get to the second part, the bulk of the book, told by lots of narrators. All of the stories at least mention Ulises and Arturo, but some only tangentially. Wikipedia (I know) has a good list of the various characters telling the stories. Ulises and Arturo went to Europe for a few years, then back to Mexico, and got into mischief. They kind of turned people off. They didn't seem to write much poetry. Finally, we reach the third part, which is a continuation of the first. After leaving town (they were all trying to hide Lupe from her pimp), they drive to the Sonora Desert to search for the founder of visceral realism, Cesárea Tinajero, and Things Happen.

I really loved this novel, though it took me forever to read. It seems like the kind that you need to reread and study: it's really complex, and working on wrapping your head around all of it would probably be rewarding. That said, I'm not going to reread it - at least not in the near future.

For a novel about poets, there's very, very little poetry in it, and we only get to see one official visceral realist poem by Cesárea Tinajero, which is basically a series of drawings. It's interesting that we don't hear anything from Ulises Lima or Arturo Bolano themselves, that it's all stories surrounding them. Even Garcia Madero, to my knowledge, only appears in the first and last parts.

A funny bit: At some point while I was reading, I tweeted that Bolaño shares Don DeLillo's love of lists, even that he puts DeLillo's lists to shame. Then, toward the end (page 574), Bolaño talks briefly about DeLillo, calling him a "phenomenon." That gave me a chuckle.

It would actually be pretty interesting to compare Bolaño to DeLillo. The Savage Detectives fits pretty squarely under the Postmodernism bracket (vague as it is), and there are lots of Deserts and unhappiness and motels. Bolaño almost makes DeLillo interesting again.

I waited too long to write this one, so I don't have much to say. Cannery Row is a very short novel about, well, Cannery Row in California around the Great Depression. It starts off with a description of the town's grocery store owner and how he influences the community, then moves on to other characters, like a series of vignettes. Eventually, though, Steinbeck settles on some guys who rent from the grocery store owner and do occasional work for a doctor (they call him doc) who supplies medical parts, mostly in jars. The men want to throw him a party, and they accidentally cause lots of damage in his lab. They try again, and Doc finds out about it first, so he makes preparations, but windows get knocked out and the like, too. There are some fun fights and dealings with the local brothel madam. And that's about it. It's short.

I love Steinbeck. He's one of my very favorite authors. Many years ago, I read Travels with Charley and Of Mice and Men, and, more recently, I read The Grapes of Wrath. I enjoyed all of them immensely, just as I did Cannery Row. My favorite was The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden is on my to-read list. Next up, though, is Sweet Thursday, which is a sort of sequel to Cannery Row, and the liberry happened to have it. I have a few of his other novels in one of my bookcases, and I think I'll be moving through them pretty quickly.