Trials in Reading

Life seems to have been very stressful lately, and in consequence I have been lying about the place like a beached whale, wondering if my zip will ever return. One part of this has been relief that another edition of Shiny New Books is out in the world and doing splendidly. But after reading twenty-two books in succession that needed to be read, I was finding it particularly difficult to make an autonomous decision about what to read next. Plus, I was in an awkward reading mood, my brain like a bit of overstretched elastic, and so I needed just the right thing. My comments on the following books should be understood in that light.

I first picked up Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. The cover promised me loads of fun from this international bestseller, and it certainly began in jolly fashion. Out of work web designer, Clay Jannon, finds himself a stopgap job working the night shift at the strangest bookstore in the Bay area. The books are in code, the customers are mad and his boss exudes a benign but enigmatic mysticism. Clay teams up with a beautiful young woman who works at Google to try and solve the mystery of the shop and – hang on a minute! I’ve spent a lot of time with geeky boys, one way or another, and there was a major implausibility about a geek getting a hot girlfriend and taking it in his stride. Either he wouldn’t have given two hoots from that point onwards what was happening in the bookshop, or he would have remained utterly obsessed with the quest until the girlfriend huffed off in a snit. Of course, geeks are allowed their fantasies, too, and maybe they dream about the effortless acquisition of soulmates. That’s great. I could see this was a fun book, but somehow I couldn’t quite fit the world. If you love science and computers and books too, then this would be a wonderful story for you. I was just too much of an arts student to really get into it. I let it go.

Around about the same time, I’d started Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the classic Philip K. Dick novel on which Blade Runner was based. Not my kind of book, you might be thinking, and you’d be right. But Dark Puss and I are having a new reading challenge this summer. We’re reading books outside our comfort zone, and this was the one chosen to be outside mine. I have never read a work of science fiction before, and initially, I found it hard going. It was clearly written in English; I understood the words individually and even at the level of the sentence, but I found myself rereading paragraphs several times to try to figure them out. After a while, I realised I was having a failure of imagination. Because the world I was reading about did not exist, as such, I was struggling to create pictures in my mind. I couldn’t get into the text, and was bouncing about on its surface, unable to gain traction. I was also feeling incorrigibly feminine, and rather wishing that someone, in either of these novels, would have a baby or go shopping or need to sit down and speculate on another person’s emotions. Something I could get behind. In the end, having persevered through the early stages, I did find the novel easier to read, and it’s definitely a good and highly thought-provoking book. But I’ll talk about it in more depth another time.

I’ve been meaning to read J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey for ages. It’s certainly been displayed in my side bar for weeks now. So after two techie books, I picked it up, looking forward to what I expected to be a stupendous experience in fine writing. The first part about Frannie I thoroughly enjoyed. Frannie is having a religious crisis, and her boyfriend, Lane, has zero interest in anything other than his own opinions. The second part finds Frannie back at her childhood home, with her mother bursting at the seams with worry over her, and her younger brother, Zooey, being dragged in to help. The novella is about 160 pages long and consists of about four conversations. I figured it was roughly between 30-40 pages for each one. J. D. Salinger is one of those authors (Proust is another who springs to mind) who is determined to tell you everything, whether you want to hear it or not. Every nuance of the conversation, every piece of clothing, every tiny gesture on the part of the interlocutors, every thought, every glance, every small item they fiddle with, as if it were a significant prop in a powerful drama, is recounted in admittedly striking and clever prose. There are many wonderful sentences and stunning observations. It is all done with exquisite realism, but so much reality (far more than any casual observer could take in) that it becomes artfully artificial. A world of writing, rather than a written world. By about halfway through ‘Zooey’, I felt as if I were lying on the floor, crushed by the weight of arch declamations, yelling, okay, okay, J. D., you are brilliant, now STOP already!

After that, things began to get a bit more normal on the reading front, but this has gone on a while now and I’ll carry on with the rest next week. I am painfully aware how behind I am in blog reading, and I do hope to catch up soon, once I have a little oomph again. I very much want to catch up with you all and see what reading adventures you have been on.