Nerdsdropping: Overread in DC

I spend a good portion of my day schlepping from Maryland to Northern Virginia on the DC Metro, which gives me nearly two hours a day to read and nap while pretending to read.

The Metro is also a good place to do some nerdsdropping on my fellow readers. Having lived in America’s most highly educated metropolis for over a year now, I thought I would take nourishment from the vibrant intellectual capital that surrounds me and see what my fellow DC nerds are reading.

So what are all these uptight smart-looking, bifocaled Beltway types around me reading? Turns out to mostly be reports on really boring topics like emergency preparedness and Stieg Larsson. Almost dangerous quantities of Stieg Larsson.

During my week of creepy book-leering, I have discovered that the taste of the average DC reader is–how do I put this?–bad. For instance, the title of a book like The Art of Racing In the Rain actually sounds kind of poetic–until you look it up and discover it’s a blatant Marley and Me cute doggie ripoff.  Scratch that off my “possible read” list.

I did like that a punked out kid with a shirt that read vegan and tattoos up and down his face–including a conspicuous lotus flower on his chin–was reading the A Year of Living Biblically. Meanwhile his slightly less punked out boyfriend sat next to him reading trash about vampires. I suspect it’s just a matter of time before these two go from totally straight edge to handing out Chick pamphlets on the street.

Of all the books whose titles I was able to see, only Updike’s Rabbit is Rich and Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, a nonfiction account of the devastation of the Dust Bowl, struck me as potential books to track down.

I think I can now go back to ignoring my fellow passengers in peace.

(Rfslack)

What to read next?

I envy readers who approach their reading systemically, readers for whom reading is a process of getting to the bottom of a few private obsessions. Systematic readers may not always know what book comes next—but they will at least be able to narrow it down to a few good candidates. I mean, if you’re obsessed with the Soviet erotica, there’s a good chance that your next book will about Soviet erotica. (I assume such a thing existed.)

Then there are also readers who read purely as an aesthetic experience. I hold nothing but admiration for these readers.  There are some—or, so  I imagine, because I am not like this—who view each book as an opportunity to, in the words of Walter Pater, “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.”  (How many moody undergraduate humanities students over the years have swooned to these words just before deciding to take on a lifetime of financial aid debt to pursue an MA in Art History?) For these readers, there’s a good chance you’ll be satisfied with some random 19^th century Russian and French doorstop.

My approach to reading is neither especially admirable or worthy of envy.  Though I have my interests and sense of beauty, my reading philosophy can best be summed up as “eclectic nerd.”  There is a dutiful part of me—a smattering of Midwestern rectitude I inherited from my Ohio parents—that says that you do certain things because you darn well should.  I feel this way about books sometimes. There are certain books I should read because, damn it, I should read something at some point by Balzac or Günter Grass or (I suppose) Joyce Carol Oates.

Eclectic nerds like myself want to balance reading something new with reading a classic they blew off in college with reading about world religions they find vaguely ridiculous with trying to finally figure out what the hell the Frankfurt School actually was with learning about what America has done to poor brown-skinned people in remote parts of the world. 

As a result, putting down one book and picking up another for me can be a surprisingly difficult. Earlier this week I finished John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. On my desk in front of me is normally a neat stack of books that I collected because they seem like books I really should read. I have been going through these books for the past two days, trying to decide what book I want to/should read next. The books are now clumped in scattered piles. 

In the off chance you have an opinion, here are some of my options:

• I like the idea of reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier because it’s on the Modern Library’s list of top 100 books—and because I enjoy the fact that the author’s first and last name are the same. (I like William Carlos Williams for the same reason–oh, and his poetry’s pretty good, too.) 
• I meant to read The Decline of the West when I was 21 and was ready to flush Western Civilization down the drain. But has anyone read this outside of a course reading list during the past 75 years?
• Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy appeals to me because maybe it will teach me to console myself with a little philosophy rather than single malt Scotch. Besides, I should probably know a little something about what it was like at the court of Theodoric during the sixth century, right?
• Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, because the publisher managed to slap a blurb from president Barack Obama on the cover. 
• I’m wondering if Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is close enough to being out of fashion again that I should finally bother with it.
• Nathaneal West’s Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust, for some reason.
• The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.  Because maybe I’ll like spy thrillers.
• Vanity Fair was one of TS Eliot’s favorite novel (an endorsement you might consider a little dubious) but every time I look at its 10,000 or so pages I start seeing if there’s a book on my bookshelf with zombies on the cover. (Speaking of zombies, World War Z is also on my desk—Studs Terkels meets, uh, zombies!)
• Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I am starting to wonder if I might be closer to an English Tory than an American Democrat. Then again: Margaret Thatcher.
• The Wisdom of Insecurity. Because I aspire to be the most restless/impatient/distracted Buddhist in history, coked-up Hollywood Buddhists excepted.
• Etc.

Any thoughts?

(Rfslack)

Sex, death and nostalgia: three short reviews

The last three novels I’ve read have included a total of seven suicides, five acts of self-destructive sex and immeasurable quantities of nostalgia. To paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy, but a handful of deaths is a real page turner.

Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is the story of a young man who falls in love with a fragile girl whose ex-boyfriend’s suicide leads—spoiler alert!—to her own psychological disintegration and suicide. Known for his forays into magic realism, the only fantasy Murakami brings to bear in this story is the somewhat unbelievable fact that Toro, the laconic loner at the heart of the novel, somehow manages to effortlessly stumble into bed with an assortment of lovelies. (One suspects there may be more than a little authorial wish fulfillment at work here.) The book quickly becomes an overheated fugue of loneliness and suicide and mental disintegration—such a piling up of the rawest materials of literary art that it comes off a bit like cheating. And yet, as much as you are perfectly aware that you are being manipulated, I defy anyone one who reads this book to avoid remaining disconcerted for days by the book’s massively overdetermined final act.

Like Murakami, LP Hartley’s The Go-Between revolves around the kind of bad sex that leads to great literary suicide. (Personally I concur with Woody Allen’s quip that “even my worst orgasm was just right,” but then again I did not have to operate within the strict social rules of the Edwardian upper class that this book depicts.) I picked up this book after seeing its first line quoted for the 100th time: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” (That line is, by itself, is worthier than Carl Sandburg’s entire oeuvre.) As with Norwegian Wood, this book is a look back to youthful events that ending up recasting the narrator’s entire life. (The novel’s beginning is framed as the reconstruction of a childhood diary.) Spending the summer with the family of a wealthy friend from school, young Leo Colston passes letters between his friend’s sister (who is being courted by a local aristocrat disfigured in the Boer War) and a local farmer. Leo serves as the go-between in more ways than one—his role as a mediator of class is especially important—as he unwittingly serves as the catalyst for the novel’s (again) gruesome end. Though seemingly a bit fussy at first, the book becomes increasingly subtle, textured and inexorable. An almost perfect novel.

My latest bad sex/suicide book is John O’Hara’s 1930 novel Appointment in Samarra. Self-destructive sex? Check. Julien English, the novel’s protagonist, drunkenly attempts hanky panky with the torch singer girlfriend of a local mobster in a roadhouse parking lot while his wife stews inside. No matter what decade it is, this is a bad move. Suicide? Check. The novel is constructed so that each bad decision, starting with the senseless throwing of a drink into the face of an annoying man English owes money to, ends up culminating in (and this might sound familiar) his gruesome end. An artful book, dense and kaleidoscopic, the more time that goes by the less it has remained with me. It leaves me somewhat cold, perhaps because it strives to be relentlessly modern and brassy instead of morose and backwards-looking—in short, lacking in nostalgia.

In the end, maybe bad sex and suicide aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

(Rfslack)