Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

Slow Man
By J.M. Coetzee
272 pages, Penguin (2005)

It must seem to many of my friends, into whose hands I endlessly thrust books and magazine pieces, that in the last six months since I moved to New Orleans I have loved and been excited by most things I’ve read. That’s not true at all. I’m actually ridiculously picky and opinionated and read quite a lot and am thoroughly indifferent to most of it. But once I read a bad book that’s bad in an uninteresting way, I never have to see it again. The black hole under my (subletted) bed sucks it right up.

The hole doesn’t err, either. Not once have I found I book I enjoyed and missed under my bed, or even a book I grudgingly admired but passionately disliked—those stay faithfully in their proper place next to it.

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

84, Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff
104 pages, Moyer Bell, 25th Anniversary Edition (1995)

Hi, I’m back! That took a while longer than I thought, though what kept me away turned out, wonderfully, to be far less dire than I thought. And being sick re-introduced me to an old, beloved book. So let’s get right to it, shall we?

I sometimes think that the hardest task of being an adult is learning to comfort yourself when you’re sick or weak or hurting, learning how to be the one giving comfort and the one taking it, both. A lot of us do that, I think, by keeping a small army of Proustian madeleines on hand, ready at any moment to conjure a past in which we were more easily comforted. An old boyfriend of mine kept a jar of Vicks VapoRub in his medicine cabinet no matter the season, and would smear his chest with it whenever he felt under the weather, even if the ailment was a hangover. Just the smell was enough to summon his mother’s hand. For a friend, comfort is a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish value meal, even when the thought of other solid food makes her nauseas. And me? I keep Helene around.

Hiatus.

Can one take a temporary medical leave from blogging? ‘Cause that’s what I’m doing.

Be back soon.

“Girl Reporter” by Stephanie Harrell

“Girl Reporter”
by Stephanie Harrell
From Who Can Save Us Now? Brand New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories
Edited by Owen King and John McNally
Free Press  (2008)
Originally published in One Story

Let me get my biases out of the way right up front: I may have only recently stopped using “grok” as a verb, but I haven’t read speculative fiction since I was a kid. It’s a form of stereotyping, sure—heck, let’s call it book profiling—but life’s too short to read everything published and life’s also too short to read bad books. So you’ve got to find some way to winnow the candidates down. I got frustrated with the cookie-cutter sentences in genre books and kicked them all to the curb.

But, well… superheroes! Superhero stories written by people like Jim Shepard and Elizabeth Crane! And me with “”Spidey” as one of my nicknames in high school!

In this case, resistance was futile.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth
By Jhumpa Lahiri
352 pages, Knopf (2008)

There came a point reading this book that I closed it and realized I was wishing desperately for a handkerchief. The fantasy was very specific: I wanted a crisp white handkerchief edged in lace and embroidered with pastel flowers, the kind that would have once (and perhaps still does) belonged to grandmothers. The kind that they’d have called a hanky, just before pressing it to a child’s face and directing her to blow.

I would not blow, but I would hold it to my face, using it to shield my eyes and nose, which would be reddened and inflamed from sobbing. I would go in search of a cup of tea and as I stood in line at the coffee shop down the street someone would take note of my huddled shoulders and my tear-stained cheeks. That kindly stranger would place a hand on my back and inquire, gently, if I was okay. “I don’t want to talk about it!” I would wail, waving my hanky to shoo them away.

“Walking With An Essayist” by Bonnie J. Rough

“Walking With An Essayist”
by Bonnie J. Rough
from identity theory (www.identitytheory.com)
Published December 19, 2006
Found via Blog of a Bookslut

Perhaps I should call this one the return of the prodigal blogger. I fold closed a book and fall asleep one night grateful for words, luxuriating in them, thinking I would bathe in words if I could, that I would swim in a sea of text and spend my days that way—back-floating over allusions, breast-stroking through metaphors—and that would be all it would take, always and ever, to make me happy. And I wake up thinking of a word, lexiconance, that is something of what I am trying to say: that words (reading them and writing them both) sustain me. And then I go on to WordPress and start a blog of this name, thinking that I will use it not for big statements, not for long and carefully considered reviews, but for a simple recording of words daily encountered. A blog that treats words as nourishment, no less necessary and no more or less remarkable than air and water.

And then what happens?

“Portrait of the School Shooter As a Young Man” by David Vann

“Portrait of the School Shooter As a Young Man”
by David Vann
Esquire (August 2008)

The opening section of this is quiet, rhythmic. Hypnotic, you might say. The sort of prose you read a sentence or two of while flipping through the magazine and then keep reading, even though you know you shouldn’t, even though it’s past 2 AM and this will surely ruin your last chance of getting some actual sleep. It’s made up of fragments, but they’re good fragments. They have the rhythm of a heartbeat, the rhythm of a scared kid’s breath, his quiet in-and-out as he sits in his motel room, holding the gun he’s longed to hold, listening to the mix CD he made to get himself through this moment. He can’t stop, he knows what’s coming, what he’d going to do, and you just can’t stop, either, even though you know, too.

You Must Be This Happy To Enter: Stories by Elizabeth Crane

You Must Be This Happy To Enter: Stories
By Elizabeth Crane
183 pages, Punk Planet Books (2008)

Okay, so, right of the bat from the title: Not the kind of thing I usually read. I’ve only been with you five posts (Perhaps I should change the subtitle of this blog to daily-except-when-felled-by-epic-New-Orleans-style-hangover. Written by she-who-is-sometimes-too-enamored-of-the-hyphen.), but you’ve nonetheless probably already figured that out. And did I tell you there’s a Precious Moments-style figurine on the cover? Or that it includes a story called “Sally (Featuring Lollipop the Rainbow Unicorn)”?

I have never before read anything with “lollipop” or “unicorn” in the title, and “rainbow” only gets a pass if Pynchon’s behind it.

“My Life in Sales” by Ann Pratchett

“My Life in Sales”
by Ann Pratchett
The Atlantic Monthly (Special Fiction Issue 2008)

For a woman who hopes to publish a book one day and looks upon the idea of an even sparsely (heck, even not-at-all) attended book tour as The Greatest Fun Ever, reading an established writer grouse about how terrible book tours are is really fucking depressing. (And I say this knowing full well that so far I have blogged about death, murder, incest, and nuclear holocaust, and have called none of them depressing. So be it. We writers are a notoriously self-absorbed lot.) I have no doubt that however bad Ann Pratchett thinks things were for a first-time novelist in 1992, they’re even worse now. When was the last time you heard someone describe driving as a way to save money?

I was all worked up when I read this yesterday, so worked up that I ran to my laptop and started pounding out the beginning of a blog post. But you know what? Just one day later? Myeh. Totally don’t care.

“Nuclear City: The Megadeath Intellectuals” by Martin Amis

“Nuclear City: The Megadeath Intellectuals”
by Martin Amis
From Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
Random House (1993)
Originally published in Esquire in 1987

A couple of years ago in London I binged on Martin Amis. I was lonely and a little sad and had made the unfortunate choice of a following a summer of working for a death penalty defense firm with a visit to the Tower of London, which apparently everyone but me, direct from Heathrow and not thinking about much beyond how jet-lagged I was, realized was the setting of a couple of hundred executions. That did it for me and tourist sites. I took refuge in the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, where I happened to find a stack of used Amis, and so for ten days I did little else but lie on the grass of London’s various parks reading his novels all day, one after the other, and see cheap theatre at night.

Unfortunately, that quantity turned out to be an overdose. I still think often of the female narrator of Night Train (I know his other books are better regarded, but hers is the voice that’s stayed with me), but I haven’t touched Amis since. Until I found another used bookshop, this one here in New Orleans at the start of my time here. It’s called McKeown’s and has such a ridiculously well curated collection that I have yet to make it substantially beyond the “A”s. This was one of my first finds, inexplicably shelved in fiction.

And here’s what I learned from it: Nuclear warfare experts are an awful lot like Barbie doll collectors.