Handed a spiralling reading list to celebrate finishing my
first year at university-a list that I'd count a pretty heavy text in
itself-I've avoided most of it like the black death. Here, in no particular
order, is what I read this summer.
Tess of the
d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy took me a while. Maybe it was getting back
into the routine of reading after some time apart, or maybe it was just how
boring I found most of it. It's written gorgeously, and every few sentences
something poetic really sticks out at you-the miasma of drunken conversation.
But it didn't make up for how much I hated every single character. There are
some very impactful moments-a woman's desperate prayers as her rape-child dies
in her arms, the timid Tess magnified to some witchy, elemental power. Alec, her
'reformed' rapist, demanding that she marry him to remain "morally right
and proper". Things like that, made shocking by either dismantling Victorian
ideals of exemplifying them to such a harrowing degree that we are reminded of
how dire they really were. But God, it was boring. I cheered the murder.
But boring doesn't come close to Ulysses by James Joyce. I got through about 400 pages, decided I
was wasting my time and stopped. I got little enough out of Tess, but this was
a joke by comparison. I enjoyed, occasionally, some of the linguistic detective
work I had to do to figure out what was going on, linking the prose back to odd
words mentioned pages earlier. There were a few things that struck me as poetry
too-the flower of the masturbatory bath. But I just got tired. I'm not ready
for this, but I felt a bit better than that when Bob Dylan mentioned in his
book Chronicles Vol. 1 that he couldn't
make head or tail of the thing either. Dylan's book is wonderful-probably the
best autobiography I've ever read. That's because Dylan doesn't write it like
one-it opens in media res, in a freezing New York winter, and follows a few
distinct, non-chronological periods in Dylan's career rather than aiming for
something comprehensive. The writing is inflected with lyrics and beat
poetry-like the stuff he puts on the backs of his albums-and there's a lot of
interesting stuff about his reading and influences, like his sublime Nobel Prize lecture where he talks about Moby Dick (which I've not yet finished), All
Quiet on the Western Front and the Oddesy. There are great music recommendations
too-it's really bizarre today to think of Dylan hitching rides across the state
to hear rare folk records at friends' houses-just a completely different weight
placed on listening. Certain sections are more interesting than others, and I
found some of the bits on recording and music theory a little dull, especially
since I didn't know the songs. But overall it's excellent, and the final
pages-leaving the superficial paradise of folk music for the world owned by
neither God nor the devil where bras and bibles work alike-is powerful beauty.
To go with Joyce, I read quite a bit by the other big
modernist T.S.Eliot-essays, poems, a play. I read The Waste Land again and some criticism, and I still love it, and
trying to work out the allusion and just what's going on-think I missed the
seduction of the secretary first time around. It's more manageable detective
work than Joyce. I guess Eliot and Joyce were doing a similar thing in resisting
the conformity they saw in modern life through radical creation, but Eliot just
seems so much better. I liked Murder in
the Cathedral too, even if verse drama is pretty unfashionable. It has that
idea of fear of change you see in The Waste Land, and a really funny moment
where the killers break out of the verse and explain, in dull, precise prose,
just why they did it. For pages. His essays,
however, I can't stand. His fascistic, misanthropic self comes out in the way
he talks about the general reader, and his objective correlative take on Hamlet
is just garbage. I also read a few Cantos
by his contemporary Ezra Pound, and I thought their movement, rhythm, and
how the sound works it way around all the complex allusion and classic stuff
was just brilliant. Must read a bit more, but the book is fucking big.
I read a few more
recent novels too, mostly recommended by the English faculty. I saw a friend in
Don Dellio's trippy The Day Room in Cambridge and very much enjoyed it, as I
did his book White Noise. It's very
quippy-nearly every sentence has something clever or funny about it, and the
dialogue has that Lynchian ability to zoom into flowery hyperrhetoric at a
moment's notice. There are a bunch of great ideas going on-Hitler studies, the
Toxic Airborne Event, although the violent ending with the gun feels very
forced. Even better was Remainder by
Tom McCarthy-addictive reading, and a great study of Melvillian monomania that
spirals into a violent ending which is satisfying and actually makes sense.
It's a really good premise-just a guy trying to recreate something, with total
particularity. Less interesting was The
Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Like White Noise, it's idiosyncratically
written with lots of long, listing sentences, but the whole thing is so
(deliberately) convoluted and hard to follow that I soon got sick of it. The
best part was a little like the best part of Murder in the Cathedral-a load of
pages devoted to a description of the plot of The Courier's Tragedy-a spoof
Renaissance drama in the style of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Spanish
Tragedy that effectively picks out the excesses of the genre-it's all incest,
backstabbing, people getting shot out of cannons in a mess of flying bloody
pulp. I liked Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas rather more fully, really burned through it. It's just the right
length so that all its ridiculous excesses of sex and drugs don't get dull (as
they do in Money), and the illustrations do a great job of matching it. It's
funny, destructive writing.
I got a lot of inspiration to write a teen novel from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. God,
I loved this book, but it's a serious guilty pleasure, because you can see how
blatantly steals from The Catcher in the Rye, and how much it influenced John
Green (incidentally, I did the best never have I ever yesterday-never have I ever
cried over a John Green novel). All the fun here is in the narrator Charles
Highway, a brilliant, big-cocked name as he notes on the first page. He's truly
awful, in a delightfully awful way. Chummy with Blake, and not just because of
all the fucks he got me. Taking Rachel to see a French film, to let her know
how good I was going to turn out in bed. Obsessed, with literary pretension,
means of seduction, narcissism. Lists of the top ten anxieties of the week,
like the charts. He's terrible. It's a terrible delight, from start to finish.
I'm glad I didn't read it a few years ago, because I think it would have made
me much, much worse than I was with just Plath and Salinger (and all the literary
stuff would have gone right over my head).
I read The Communist
Manifesto, this time with an AJP Taylor introduction, and wow has my
opinion changed. Communism is an idea I could start to get behind, but Marx
himself went down so much in my estimation reading this now. Holy shit. He just
lies. The big one-history is the history of class conflict-is just a big, empty
generalisation. Uniformed, GCSE stuff. For most of history, the working classes
have been pretty happy to be subservient if it ensures survival. Even the
French revolution was a product of rich men. There a other big generalisations,
like his ignoring conflict within classes, and his whole philosophy seems to
move towards a proletariat utopia, history moving towards an endpoint,
wrongheaded thinking like Hegel. And he's just plain wrong about a lot of
stuff-capitalism peaking in 1847, the Manchester cotton workers being the
hungry proles, assuming that industry could represent all industry, the working
class getting poorer as capitalism develops, value being determined by the
socially necessary labour. Marx was a propagandist y'know. Sure it's an
influential book (the last religion?), but a lot of the work was already there
I think-Babeuf etc. I also read some great introductory philosophy books by Paul Stathern-Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche-just
the useful stuff.
I'm trying to get a more solid understanding of art-I've
just started The Story of it. Because it looked so beautiful, I read Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which is
a great set of essays. I was reminded of how it's impossible not to take
Shakespeare out of context with the stuff about the art world curling back into
issues of value and rarity as the real world becomes more democratised. The
essay on the presentation of women was predictable and dated in parts, but
interesting in the specific discussions of paintings, and the one on
advertising and the invention of glamour is excellent. Ads steal your self
worth, man. And then they charge you for it back.
I've just started Stephen King's It after seeing the film
(which, I'll just say, I loved), and earlier in the summer I read Different Seasons, a collection of four
novellas and my 10th King book, after just about enjoying Stand by Me (I've
still not seen The Shawshank Redemption though). Shawshank is great fun-simple,
but a blast. The Body also terrific. Apt Pupil is the best in the set, probably
the most horrific thing I've read by him. The Breathing Method is really two
ideas, and a little more unhinged, but still gripping and packs a real shocker
towards the end. Superb set, with some of the man's best character work. I also
cut through The Stepford Wives by
Ira Levin, King's favourite suspense writer. I would have liked a bit more on
the whole robot thing, but the ending is quietly unpleasant, and male resistance
seems quite an interesting issue in second wave feminism that I've not really
thought about before. Levin, on the basis of this and Rosemary's Baby, seems a
deeply feminist writer.
And I'm still reading Moby
Dick, Dombey and Son and Middlemarch, but I'm not there yet.
