SansPoint

I began this year with a list of ten books I want to read^[1], and two-and-a-half months into the year, I’ve completed two of them. Considering the time left, and the eventual opening up of my schedule (with any luck) after May, I think I’m on track to accomplish the goal set out.

The first one I attacked was the excellent, bizarre, and strange House of Leaves. It’s my first real exposure to Ergodic literature, and the odd looks I’m sure I got on the subway as I turned the book around 360º to read passages that placed oddly on the page were absolutely worth it.

The second book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, at least to me, lived up to its audacious title. I can certainly see why some would find Dave Eggers’s writing style to be obnoxious. His stylistic… quirks, let’s call them… are intense, self-referential, and obvious. However, I’m a sucker for the metafictional device. If there’s anyone fit to write an introduction to Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories, it’s Eggers, no question.^[2]

I’m about to start in on The Stone Raft by José Saramago, which has been sitting on my shelf for close to a year and a half. Well, not so much sitting on my shelf, as in a special, reserved section for books borrowed from others. My wonderful, understanding, girlfriend lent to me, not long after I finished The Double, and it’s sat with me since. I love Saramago’s style. His run-on sentences look imposing, but once you get into it, it feels like a printed version of a proper, old-fashioned storyteller speaking to you from across a campfire; albeit, a storyteller who concocts bizarre tales of exact duplicate people and the Iberian peninsula breaking off from Europe and floating out to sea.

After this, I think I’ll move on to Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. I’ve harped on how much I love his work before, and it’s been said that Kafka is his best since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I’d like to see if that’s true.

1. This list, I should point out, exists to describe personal reading. As I am a student at the time of this writing, I have quite a heavy load of academic reading to do, and I’ve certainly read more than just two books in the past 2.5 months. ↩
2. I’ve been meaning to buy a subscription to McSweeney’s, but the money’s just not there for now. ↩

7 Current Writers Someone Else is in Love With.

Found this post on Zen Habits, a wonderful Lifehacking blog, and thought I should post my own.

1. Haruki Murakami - Let’s not mince words… Murakami is a god among writers. His work continues to amaze me with its clever blend of realism and surrealism, his masterful control of plot, and his ability to make you laugh at one moment, and cringe in fear in the next.

2. David Foster Wallace - His work takes an investment of time, particularly his short fiction, which can be incredibly experimental, but the payoff is worth it. And besides, how many writers can successfully switch between 10-dollar words and phrases like “in the shit”?

3. Thomas Pynchon - Okay, I still haven’t finished Against the Day, but it his previous novels have been amazing stuff. That he’s still producing, and still matching his previous quality^[1] is impressive.

4. Jose Saramago - Sadly, I’ve only read one of his novels, The Double, but it was an experience. His novels look intimidating, with long, sprawling, multi-clause sentences, and traditional demarcations of dialoge.However, the natural, flowing way he writes is easy to settle into. He feels like a traditional storyteller.

5. Don DeLilo - Like Saramago, I’ve only read one of his novels, but I picked the essential: White Noise, which is an amazing piece of literature. No novel I’ve read before, or since, deals with the fear of death and paranoia quite like it. I’m anxious to read his post 9/11 novel, Falling Man.

1. based on the 3/8ths of AtD I read ↩

Books On My Shelf

1. Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day
2. José Saramago - The Stone Raft
3. Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
4. Gabriel Garcia Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
5. David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster

Books I Need to Get:

1. Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
2. Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
3. Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
4. David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
5. Don DeLilo - Mao II

Not all of these are new books by any stretch, just new to me.

1. Haruki Murakami - After Dark
2. The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories
3. Yasunari Kawabata - The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
4. A Bernadette Mayer Reader
5. Audre Lorde - Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
6. Art Spiegelman - Maus : A Survivor’s Tale
7. William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
8. Al Gore - The Assault on Reason
9. Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner - Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
10. Donald Barthelme - Sixty Stories

Here’s hoping for a great year of books in 2008. Maybe I’ll finally finish Against the Day.

If you were being blocked from the site recently, that should be fixed now. A plugin I use changed the thingie that it uses to make sure spambots and other malicious scripts can’t access it, and started blocking everyone. Even me.

That’s sorted out now. Expect a review of After Dark soon, as well as a few musings on Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami’s first novel.