i'm a very very complex person

I finished The Killer Angels this morning. The ending was just incredibly moving. In retrospect, I can see how the book could be seen as sentimental, but while reading it I was absolutely swept up in the emotion of it. The southerners, Longstreet, Lee, Armistead, reminded me a little bit of Larry McMurtry's characters from Lonesome Dove. They share a strong, unspoken code of honor, and a deep inarticulateness when it comes to emotions. I'm very interested in the way that authors can convey the intensity of relationships between people who are completely unable to talk about their feelings for each other. In a wy, it's similar to what I'm trying to do in my own novel...

Now the question is what to read next? I've got T.C. Boyle's Drop City at home, as well as a book of short stories by Updike, so it looks like I'll be choosing between those two options.

I finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh a few days ago. It seems rather slight when compared with Michael Chabon's later work, but I thought that it was really quite impressive for a debut novel. There's just something about the characters that makes it very easy to identify with them, despite the fact that their circumstances are ridiculous and their lifestyles are often blatantly unrealistic. I'm not sure that I really loved the way Chabon had Art deliver a kind of sum-it-all-up, moral-of-the-story type speech at the end, but all in all I thought it was quite well-written and gripping.

After finishing, I started Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. I really should have read it back when I was twelve and in my extreme Civil War buff phase, but even now I'm finding it to be a great book. It's obviously very thoroughly researched, and Shaara does a great job of capturing the personalities and temperaments of these different men, and expressing the ways in which their individual natures influenced the course of the war. For some reason, the book is making me think about the way that certain names just evoke the history with which they are associated. The names of certain battles, certain men, just seem to kind of echo through the culture, and just by invoking those names you can call up strong emotions: Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam. The particular names at Gettysburg: Seminary ridge, the peach orchard, Pickett's charge... And the same can be said of the place names in other wars, at other times. I don't think I'm doing a good job of expressing what I mean.

My one little quibble with The Killer Angels so far, is the fact that the only people who are turned into fully fleshed-out characters are the officers. The ordinary soldiers who fill up the ranks are never even given names. Certainly when dealing with a subject as big as the battle of Gettysburg, an author has to be selective about he does and doesn't include, but it makes me wonder what Billy Prior would have to say about Shaara's exclusive focus on officers.