i'm a very very complex person

Tommy did so much reading that he had to take a nap.

Yesterday I finally, finally finished Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. I got so bogged down in it, and it took forever. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, I am sympathetic to some of Hesse's themes, but I just could not stand Hesse's pedantic and preachy approach to those themes. Hesse seems to believe that his readers are incapable of handling subtlety, so he hectors us with repetitions and lectures and heavy-handed prose. Bah! It didn't help that I found the narrator, Harry Haller, to be insufferably self-absorbed.

Perhaps I should have just put it down, but I didn't. I forced myself to struggle through, and now that it's done, it feels like a relief. Perhaps this is the tail-end of last year's mediocre reading, and I just needed to get it out of the way so I can usher in an era of exciting new books.

After my unpleasant experience with Steppenwolf, I am taking a break from my German literature reading project, at least for as long as it takes me to read Toby's Room by Pat Barker. I love Pat Barker; her Regeneration trilogy has for years been the thing I would choose if I could put my name on the work of any other writer. But of course that makes trouble for her other books--none of them quite live up to Regeneration. Toby's Room is a sequel of sorts to Life Class (although it begins at a point that falls chronologically earlier than any of the action in Life Class), and I'm excited about it because I thought Life Class was a bit thin, full of interesting ideas and characters that needed further development.

I've only read the first 70 pages of Toby's Room, but oh, is it off to a good start! I stayed up later than I meant to last night because I just kept wanting to read a few more pages and then a few more pages... That hasn't happened to me in ages, and it's a fantastic contrast to scarcely being able to keep my eyes open through Steppenwolf. Barker focuses this time on Elinor Brooke, a character I didn't find particularly interesting in Life Class, but this time Barker has given me some very important and intriguing glimpses into her family life, and I am finding Elinor immensely compelling so far. And, as always, I love reading Barker for her brilliant way with detail. So subtle, so nimble--the way each tiny, meticulously chosen observation lights up a scene.

I finished Cavedweller a day or two ago, and it was a total disappointment. The beginning of the book had great narrative drive, but that all seemed to disappear by the time I was about a third of the way in. The driving conflict behind the first part of the story (Delia's desire to get her daughters back), was resolved when there were still hundreds of pages left in the book, and I don't think that Dorothy Allison ever managed find a compelling reason for writing the rest of those hundred of pages. She got very tangled up in her characters' lives, but not in a way that was particularly cohesive or compelling for me as the reader. I also had a big problem with the sense of time in the book. I couldn't ever seem to get a handle on how much time had passed between one episode and the next, and throughout the book I lacked a definitive sense of the ages of the characters, which made it harder for me to identify with them. Things came together a little bit near the end, but the middle just got so horribly bogged down! It was full of episodes of which I could not see the significance, and narratives that I couldn't figure out where they were going. All in all, it seemed to me to be the kind of situation where a writer puts out a critically acclaimed and massively popular first novel (i.e. Bastard Out of Carolina), and then editors become unwilling to criticize or direct the author's subsequent work.

After finished Cavedweller, I was out of new reading material, so I decided to reread The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker. I reread Regeneration shortly after finishing my own novel, and of course it was wonderful, but I didn't react anywhere near as strongly as I'm reacting to The Eye. I think it's because I'm much more familiar with Regeneration. It was my third time reading it, and I listened to it as a book-on-tape a year or two ago. Eye is much less familiar, and as I'm reading it, I'm very surprised by how much of the plot I seem to have forgotten. I think that the only other time I read it was when I was stuck in Gatwick for nearly a whole day after missing my flight to Switzerland, and I read the book almost in one sitting. So it stands to reason that I would have forgotten a lot of the details. I tend to whenever I devour a book in that way. And now, of course, I'm devouring it again. But I can't help it. It's more of those men, those repressed and yearning men that never fail to break my heart. Just like Sammy Clay, Rivers and Sassoon and the rest are forced into that state of tortured, unexpressed self-denial that I'm such a sucker for. Oh, they break my heart!

Well, I promised ages ago to give the rest of my thoughts on The Da Vinci Code, and then never got around to it. Since then, I've read a few more books so I will now try to give some abbreviated version of my thoughts on all of them.

Okay, first The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I guess it was alright, certainly a page-turner, although not nearly as literary as most of the stuff I read. The premise was kinda interesting, but the writing isn't very good, which I found frustrating. I also thought that there were a lot of instances in the book that really strained credibilty. For instance, I had difficulty believing that a dying man would have the time or the presence of mind to create such an elaborate web of secret clues in his final moments. But I suppose that this is the kind of book in which a willing suspension of disbelief is necessary. My major complaint with the book is the fact that it's ostensibly all about divine femininity and not suppressing the role of Mary Magdalen in the early church, and all sorts of feminist-type stuff, and yet the only female character spends the entire book having everything explained to her by two men. It was also completely predictable. But I can't complain. It was a fast read and a good diversion while I was finishing up my nano novel.

After finishing both The Da Vinci Code and my novel, I decided to reread a couple books that I felt could teach me a few things about some of the things I was trying to accomplish in the book that I wrote. The first one that I reread was Possession by A.S. Byatt. I was especially interested in the way in which she tied together her parallel story lines, which, as I remembered, was remarkably well done, but not really the way I want to go with my own book. It had been quite a while since I last read Possession, and I remembered it as being a great, fun book that was very intriguing, but I had forgotten quite what an impressive achievement it is. Byatt really did an amazing job of inhabiting the Victorian mindset, mores, and even writing style of her two poets. To say nothing of all the poetry she wrote for the book! The interesting thing about rereading this book was that I noticed more of the genius of it, but I also noticed certain flaws that I had overlooked the first time.

Next on my rereading list was Regeneration by the amazing Pat Barker. Regeneration is just an incredible book. Remarkably restrained, yet astonishingly powerful. As always, I was stunned by the way in which Pat Barker can convey so much with just a few hints and images. Wow. What a book.

When I finished Regeneration, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport with nothing else to read, so I was forced to resort to the miserable selection at the airport bookstore. I did the best I could, and bought The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. It was okay, although the story was fairly simplistic and not very artfully written. It would have been a much better book if the characters had had a little more depth and dimension to them. In a way it was encouraging, because as I was reading it I kept thinking, "If this is a New York Times bestseller, I should certainly be able to get my book published, at the very least!"

Since finishing The Secret Life of Bees, I've been reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, although I'm not really far enough along to say anything about it yet. Also, I'm planning to start the major revision work on my own crazy novel, so I may be posting a little less frequently than I was once accustomed to.

I finished Pat Barker's -Another World- a few days ago. It was a funny book... Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. Don't get me wrong, I liked it and all, it was just a little strange. The main reason that I found it funny is because I read the first nine-tenths of the book in an absolute lather, turning pages at an incredible rate, sucked in by the immensely suspenseful story, certain that something earth shattering was going to happen very soon. But as I got closer and closer to the end of the book, it became clear that all the suspense and foreboding were for naught, and the events in the book just quietly took care of themselves. I find that a very interesting resolution, because it's much closer to the way things usually resolve in real life. It seemed like a bit of a let down at the time, however, because Barker had gotten me to the point where I was expecting ghosts or fratricide or god-knows-what... However, ghosts and fratricide are fairly uncommon in real life, so the book is probably a better piece of literature because it left them out.

Even if that does make it a better work of literature, however, it's got nothing on the other books of Barker's that I've read. I would say that both -Union Street- and the books of the -Regeneration- trilogy are far better than -Another World-. Oh well.

And now I'm reading more Ursula K. LeGuin. Man. I don't think I've read this many of her books in such a short span of time since I was fifteen or something.... I'm currently about a quarter of the way through -Malafrena-, which is interesting because it's really not sci-fi or fantasy at all. It's about a guy who wants to foment rebellion in an imaginary Eastern European country in the 1820s. Interesting so far. It's also interesting to read after reading -Napolean Symphony-, since it provides another perspective on what Europe looked like in the wake of Napolean's empire.