A Mighty Pen

If you’re paying attention out there to what I’ve been reading (I made a handy score-keeping page), you’ll have noticed that the books I’ve selected are quite varied, and indeed share little in common. This is on purpose. I am trying to mix it up a bit, reading things that are decidedly outside my normal literary haunts, which have mainly been modern pseudo-sci-fi, spec fic type stuff, with a few classics thrown in. Incidentally, I do have a Goodreads account, should you wish to view my library and maybe add me as a friend (this is one of the few sites I actually care about maintaining, in the social network sense). Anyways, as an attempt to broaden my palette, I have been trying to pick books from other genres. I succeeded this past week in reading one from a genre I had never bothered with before, mystery, outside of the odd genre mash-ups, like Caves of Steel or the Dirk Gently books. With that aside, onto the books.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – Oh Clarkie, Clarkie. There’s a lot of those old sci-fi masters that I like to call ‘idea writers,’ that is to say, writers who were far better at exploring ideas than stories. The Overlords and the ramifications of their arrival and their actions are explored to their logical, fantastic ends, however we are given a story only on a large scale. The characters, especially the human ones, serve the purpose of showing how humanity as a whole is transitioning from one era to another. Not that there is anything wrong in that, and indeed this book was fascinating and enjoyable, but at the same time it felt cold. Compare it to something like KSR’s seminal Mars trilogy, and you get the impression that Clarke is tinkering with a novel toy.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – Antiquated though this novel may seem compared to its modern, bloodier counterparts (I’m look at you, Dragon Tattoo with the Girl), it was still an engaging read. I had trouble putting it down at points, even though all that is going on is basically a mental puzzle. We are given (most) of the same pieces that Hercule Poirot is privy to, and thus we are like an active participant in the investigation. Some of his solutions to the mystery come out of left field, so I felt a bit cheated on that account, but I had guessed the truth a while back, due perhaps to the fact that Christie was so good at her art, the archetypes of her mysteries have seeped into popular culture, and whether we realize it or not, her type of story has become cliched. I blame television.

Animal Farm by George Orwell - I’m going to admit something kinda embarrassing – I have never read 1984. Go ahead, heap upon your scorn and ridicule. In high school the only dystopia I had to read in class was Brave New World, and for reasons I don’t even recall I hated it. The idea of dystopias was tainted by it. Fahrenheit 451 and Player Piano have turned me around on them a bit, so perhaps sometime this year I will get Orwell’s other famous novel. To make a long story short, if 1984 is as good as Animal Farm, I’ll be a happy reader. What a depressing, but brilliant, book!

Okay that’s it. I feel like I’m treading over ground that too many people have passed over, and saying absolutely nothing new. I have only a cursory knowledge of literature in general and in specific genres, even those I claim as my favorite. But whatever. We’re in a new age of literature now, where readers are going to be bumbling through the masses of newly-e-pressed novels and finding that the only things we will all have in common are the classics and the blockbusters. I might as well get familiar with them.

Wow, what a week. I’m counting both this week and last week as a single one, because it has felt like it. I started it out by working a stretch of overnight shifts at work, which was interrupted by a lovely case of food poisoning, a heart attack-inducing Bronco game, and capped off by more work. How I managed to stay on pace with my reading, I will never know, but I did. Here’s a quick rundown of the books I have read this week:

The Dead Zone by Stephen King – Engaging, though a bit anticlimactic. I never watched any of the television show, but I can see why it would be a successful show. It has a good, simple premise, and I like how it is explored logically, through Johnny’s character. His actions and reactions felt like those a real person would make, and the story moved along with him, so despite the fantasy involved in the “psychic” plot device, it was a realistic, grounded story.

The World According To Garp by John Irving – hot diggity snarf bags, this dude can write. I read Owen Meany a few years back, loved it, and I think I still like that one better, but Garp is the better book. It is intense, funny, and quite blunt. The story doesn’t wrap up in a nice neat bow like Owen Meany but that’s okay. It has it’s own strength, and that lies mostly in the characters. I felt sometimes like Irving was a coroner, splitting open these people he invented and showing us everything, every bloody, human detail.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck – Wow. I’m a big Steinbeck fan, but wow. The elegant simplicity of this charming book blew me away. There’s not much of a plot going on, the whole thing is basically a window into Depression-era Monterrey, California, but I think it would have been ruined by something as obtrusive as a story. And it reads so fast, like a lot of Steinbeck, I finished it in a day.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams – I love you, Douglas. This book is my first reread of the year, something I do often and will do several times this year (I never said 100 new books in a year). And something fun and frothy was necessary after the week I’ve had, so I picked a funny old book by a funny old Brit, and as I finished it today I sighed and wished that man was still around, writing books.

That’s this week, haven’t picked my next book yet. Might swing by the book store tomorrow and dispose of a gift card. Any suggestions? Challenges, perhaps?

What’s up, geeks. So today is the annual celebration of the inevitability of death, and in honor of that, I want to posit a challenge to anyone out there with the balls to accept.

Y’see, in October, to gear up for NaNoWriMo, I re-read Stephen King’s On Writing, that memoir he wrote that is also part writing instruction manual. One of his key pieces of advice to aspiring writers is to read with abandon, to read constantly, whatever you can get your hands on. He says in there somewhere that he reads 50-80 books a year (or something like that, I don’t remember and don’t care enough to look it up). You know what that sounded like to me? It sounded like a challenge.

So I’m going to one-up that. I am going to read 100 books this year. That’s about two per week, for the mathematically challenged. And I’m not going to read a bunch of wimpy novellas, either. One of the books I pledge to read this year is Infinite Jest, and I might tackle a couple Pynchon novels, too. And maybe, if I’m in good shape, my last book will be The Stand, just as a further fuck-you-Mr. King. And in case you are wondering, I work full-time and go to school, so it’s not like I have nothing to do but sit on my ass and read.

I welcome anyone to join me in this odyssey of reading. I doubt many can do it. Think you can? Puh. And yeah, I know a bunch of people have probably done this before, on the webernet and such, but I don’t care. I still think most of you out there can’t do it.

My first book will be Mr. King’s The Dead Zone, and I will be updating you all every week or so on my progress, just to show how awesome I am.

- Z