This and that

(Of course I started writing this post yesterday morning, but only now - on Tues. - am I actually getting around to finishing it and posting...)

Not sure I mentioned this at the beginning of the year, but I've decided to keep a list (and, thus, a tally) of the books I'm reading this year. It's something I've never done - and, as a result, whenever I'm asked at the end of the year by various literate friends (it's a small list...) how many books I've read over the course of the year, I usually do a best guess-estimate. But I figure by compiling a list of completed books - I'm also maintaining a list of books I haven't managed to finish, as well as a film list - I'll be armed with meaningful, irrefutable stats!

I was steaming along quite nicely through the first two months of the year, completing about (I'm not at home as I write this, so I don't have access to the list) 11 books. (I think there were two books I started but never finished.) But I seemed to have slowed down considerably since the beginning of March. For example, just this past weekend, I turned the final page on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which took me a full two weeks to read. It's not even *that* long of a book, but I had quite a bit of social stuff over the past couple of weeks that took me away from my reading couch. And this week, I'm not going to start a book until toward the end of the week, which will slow down my progress. Good thing I'm not obsessed with the final tally.

But why no books this week? Well, I'm presenting myself with another reading goal: to (finally!) get through about eight or nine New Yorker short stories that have been piling up in the apartment. It's funny, when I first subscribed to the wonderful magazine as a teenager, I used to begin with the fiction. However, since I resubscribed about three years ago, I've mostly devoured the excellent journalism, and left the fiction until last. (Except those rare occasions when one of my fave authors, such as Bolano or Murakami, would have a story.) But since it usually takes me the full week to get through an issue, another would arrive in the post before I had a chance to read the fiction. (It might also reflect my current reading interests: I seem to be more partial to longer fiction than shorter.) As a result, I've been stockpiling issues with the intent of eventually reading the short stories. Since I've been in purge mode, the accumulated magazines are getting on my nerves! (I'm a good candidate for an e-reader, as long as the New Yorker offers an e-subscription - which I'm sure it will.) Thus, I feel it's finally time to reduce the pile. I'm aiming to read one story a day - so basically a week or so to be done with the pile - before I start a novel.

In the queue (courtesy of the TPL, where both are "in transit"): Bolano's Monsieur Pain and the new  Ian McEwan, Solar.

Short and precise

Reading Rose-coloured's recent thoughts on the film Up in the Air, where she eventually brings Denis Johnson's collection of stories from the book Jesus' Son into the conversation, brought to mind the mid-1990s. Why? Simple: Jesus' Son was once a proud tenant of my bookshelf. It was the original paperback, with the wonderful black cover. Yet, despite its occupancy, I never read the book. More scarily, I can't exactly remember why I didn't read it, and how it came to disappear from my shelf. To the best of my recollection, I think I lent it to a work colleague, who never ended up returning it. I can't say that I blame him: now that I've finally read the book, I too probably would have made off with it.

Jesus' Son has long been a book that has been in my consciousness - it just hasn't been in my actual brain. I had, naturally, heard the great things said about it - phrases like "a modern masterpiece" tend to get thrown away in discussion of the book - but I usually look toward my well-read friends as guides. My friend H. claimed that it was one of the five best books he had ever read. Another friend also said it was unforgettable, to the extent he read it twice in two days to help him not forget it. It's one of those titles that, over the past couple of years, I look for when I'm browsing secondhand book stores. I never could find it, however, which perhaps also attests to its legacy: once in a reader's possession, it remains a treasured companion. I ended up taking my copy out of the TPL, and, after spending Friday and Saturday reading it (I could have probably read it in one sitting, but I wanted to spread it out over a couple of days, to better fully take in the stories), I'm even more determined to find my own copy. Yes, this book is pretty much perfect.

"Spare" tends to be the word ascribed to Johnson's prose, but I think I prefer the word economical. His phrasing is precise and often lyrical, but there's also a wonderful rawness, a hardness, about it. For example, I love this sentence from the story "The Other Man":

"I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green - in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus - islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams."

Powerhouse! He's also fair and generous with his characters: yes, many of them live on the fringes, but there's a genuine caring and honesty about them all. These are stories that will inhabit me for a while.

I should probably break up these male authors I've been reading of late with some female writers. (I've also started reading the Tim Winton book The Turning, but I'm not planning on reading it through straight; the stories are overlapping, but I don't get a sense there's a narrative arc that requires me to read it like a novel.) There's a few in my reading queue: Atwood's Year of the Flood, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Jane Austen's Emma. I'll make my decision this evening.

The big book

It wasn't a deliberate strategy, but it appears 2009 is becoming the year of the "big book." I've tackled a number of hefty tomes so far, most recently turning the last page (over 800 of them!) on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. This is the second time I've tackled the classic novel. A few years back, I read about ten pages of the Penguin version, but my heart just wasn't in it. But I bought the new translation (the husband and wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, who seem to be tackling the major Russian works; I had intended to buy their Crime and Punishment at the Strand in NYC, but ended up leaving the store without it, although I did walk out with their translation of War and Peace), and I was hooked from the start. A proverbial page turner! The true definition of a classic! A timeless masterpiece! Well, you get the picture. This reading comes on the heels of other lengthy novels, primarily Roberto Bolano's wonderful works 2666 and The Savage Detectives (which was a re-read). I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm a novel reader, not a short story reader.

This actually is difficult for me to admit, that I love the long novel over the short story. For years, I thought I was a true short story aficionado. The evidence, while not overwhelming, was there. I had a subscription to the New Yorker when I was 17, largely because I loved the idea of having a new short story to read every week since, at the time, I fashioned myself to be an aspiring writer. And how does one "break in" to the business? By writing short stories, I reasoned. Yet, I barely remember any short stories from those early reads, although I can rattle off a good number of excellent non-fiction pieces. And even today, while still a faithful New Yorker reader (there was a several-years gap when I barely glanced at the magazine on the newsstand), the short story tends to be the last thing I read. (Unless, of course, they publish a new Haruki Murakami or Roberto Bolano story. I'm not sure David Sedaris counts, but of course I faithfully read him too. And Woody Allen, although his "casuals" are becoming increasingly lame.) I'm not outright dissing the short form - after all, I love John Cheever and Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro short stories, and there was a recent John Updike piece that blew me away; and Salinger's Nine Stories is still such an important book in my reading history - but I think I prefer the sprawling, sometimes messy, aspect of a novel over the "perfection" of the shorter work. Maybe because my own life is so messy!

That being said, I'm currently reading The Song is You by Arthur Philips.

(This post was going to be about my own attempts at writing short stories, but it morphed into something else. Which is a good clue as to why I never become much of a writer...)