My copy of David Mitchell’s latest novel came in the mail today via the UK. It’s not out for another week or so in the US, but my impatience and preference for the European edition’s cover (no dust jacket, and a tasteful cream and blue woodcut illustration) drove me to go ahead and order it.
I’m finishing up Dan Simmons’ dark, intriguing, and well-written sci-fi novel Hyperion at the moment, but Thousand Autumns will be quickly devoured after that. Blog posts for both shall be forthcoming.
Much of my spare time in 2009 was taken up by trying to complete the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge I set for myself. A couple of times, I almost quit the challenge. I had attempted it once before, a few years ago, and got to about 12 books before giving up. For me, it’s a tough challenge, since I drift towards the encyclopedic novels of writers like Pynchon or Vollmann. I knew it was a misstep, but I tried to tackle David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest midway through my quest. Halfway through that book, the need to see my quest to the end and get back on track took over. I found myself reading things I wouldn’t necessarily read, just to hit a number. This year, there will be no 52 book quest. I’ll let my natural urges take over again. I have a taste for the maximal, and this is where I will go. I intened on re-reading some old favorites for the first time in many years. A few weeks ago, I gifted a spare copy of William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows to a co-worker. It’s my favorite book, and I intend to revisit it. And I’ve had a copy of Vollmann’s 1400 page Imperial sitting here for months. It will be lonely no more. I wanted to tackle Bolano’s 2666 this past year, but after 30 pages or so, I thought that I might want to read The Savage Detectives first. And thus, I have begun there. Happy readings…..
At long last, Amazon has a listing for the new David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:
, Cloud Atlas
I pretty much checked out of the comic book scene in the early 90’s. This owes as much to Rob Leifeld’s inexplicable success during that decade and the absurd glut of mutant “X” titles as it does to my adolescent discovery of “real” literature.
This is too bad for me, because I missed out on some great stuff back then. I’ve started to play catch up thanks to collected trade paperbacks, most recently Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s brilliant Preacher series.
To briefly summarize the plot, a celestial accident occurs in Heaven, which wipes out small town Texas preacher Jesse Custer’s entire parish and grants him some serious powers thanks to an immature, yet supremely powerful, being called Genesis which inhabits him and grants him the Word, i.e. a power that allows him to make anyone do anything he says whenever he feels like it.
With his newfound power, his gal Tulip, and an Irish vampire named Cassidy, Jesse decides to track down God, who has checked out of the day-to-day oversight of His creation, get face to face with him, and hold him accountable for all the evils of the world.
What ensues is terrific drama, action, violence, gore, hilarity, and a cast of characters that includes God, the Devil, inbred hillbillies, the ultimate badass Saint of Killers, a pathetic Kurt Cobain wannabe who goes by the name “Arseface”, and John fucking Wayne.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
Incidentally, while reading it I thought to myself “what an amazing cable series this would make”. Sure enough, it was in development for HBO a few years ago, but was ultimately scrapped. Too bad, because the Arseface makeup tests are tremendous:
The B&N Review has a unique review of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice by Ward Sutton (via JeFF Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days).
James Patterson signs a three year, seventeen book deal. Think of the trees. There should be a carbon tax on his books. The funny thing is, working in a bookstore and seeing new titles of his pop up every six to eight weeks, I think the guy might be slowing down.
The Joyce family has given approval for “budget” version of Ulysses in order to flood the market prior to the expiration of the copyright in 2012. The article states that the flooding of the market will leave “little incentive for other publishers to bring out other versions.” I’m not so sure about this as a text as rich as Ulysses could certainly benefit from a Penguin edition with copious end-notes, or deluxe illustrated editions.
More clearing out of old flagged items im my RSS reader.
The Alphabet Meme: An A-Z of Nikkatsu Sleaze and Action via Like Anna Kaarina’s Sweater
Stephen Kinzer: Understanding America Through Moby Dick via The Guardian
Shuttle Toolbag Filmed From Earth via Geekologie
HOWTO cook a kick-ass pizza crust in your home oven via Boing Boing
You Never Know What You’ll Find In A Book, via NYT Book Review
The Tale Of Genji At 1,000 via The Economist
At World’s End - 25 Post-Apocalyptic Visions via Weburbanist
Awful For Travel Times, Great For Photography via The Mental Floss Blogs
The Millions Meta-Data 2008 via The Millions
2666 Review In TLS
My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader. I like it because it allows easy flagging of posts for later perusal. The main problem is that I rarely go back to them. In an effort to clean things up, I present a glimpse of how my mind works, 10 articles at a time:
The End Of The Road via Scanners
The Devil and Miss Cody via Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits
Alton Brown Pizza Dough Videos via Slice
Power Moby Dick
Steampunk via The Little Professor
French Novel Of The Decade via Conversational Reading
Det Turm In English Via Conversational Reading
The Jewish Thomas Pynchon via Conversational Reading
100 Films For The Ideal Cinematheque via Alternative Film Guide
Unlocking The European Film Vault via Open Culture
If you are J.J. Abrams, apparently the rights to film Stephen King’s Dark Tower
The Walrus Blogs have an excellent piece on Pynchon and comics.
In other Pynchon news, the man himself creates an Inherent Vice Playlist
Yahoo has the exclusive trailer for The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus.
The 5 minute red band trailer for Legion is worth a watch:
The Aquarium Drunkard takes a look back the Prince’s Sign Of The Times.
Id Software unveils footage from Rage at Quakecon:
Apparently some pretty heady stuff. In a picture of their recording loft taken with a Gigapan camera, you can zoom in and see some of the details of their book shelves. John Barth, Stanley Elkin and Georges Perec are easily spotted, as are a slew of Dalkey Archive titles. But what’s up with Rudy Giuliani’s “Leadership”?
Updated 8/17/09:
Listen to Vollmann read from and talk about Imperial on KUOW
Review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Review in The Boston Globe
Cat Dirt Sez “Crime Pay$” in 5 entries into a multi-part review of Imperial
Vollmann talks about Imperial
An interview with Paul Slovak, Vollmann’s editor, at New York Magazine
Buffalo News review
The Economist review
Minneapolis Star Tribune review
New York Magazine review
The New York Times: An Author Without Borders
Philadelphia Inquirer Review
The New York times has a slideshow of pictures from William T. Vollmann’s Imperial.
Rumor has it Pynchon lent his voice to this little promotional piece from Penguin books.
The payoff comes about three and a half minutes in, but you should watch from the start for conetxt.
Wired has a nifty Google maps guide to Pynchon’s Los Angeles.
I just go back from my local used/collectible book store, Recycled Books in Denton, Tx, where I was pulled aside by an former co-worker who is employed there now. “I was just thinking about you the other day. Check out what we got in,” he said. He went back to the collectibles area and came out with a beautiful British (Andre Deutsch) hardcover edition of William T. Vollmann’s Your Bright And Risen Angels. The funny thing is, I already own one, and it happens to be signed (the one he showed me wasn’t). So if anyone out there is interested, you can contact them at the above link. This is a VERY rare item (I think there were only 5,000 printed, most of those copies probably lost or hoarded by now) and they have it priced insanely low at 75 dollars.
1. My copy of Infinite Jest is starting to get beaten up from being dragged to work every day. It seems like I do most of my reading during my lunch hour. I do like the fact that this thing is so big that, while reading the right page, i can fold the left page around and hold it in the middle and still not crack the spine. And I’m over 300 pages in.
2. Since I don’t have internet access during my lunch hour, I can’t use resources like the Infinite Jest Wiki. These online resources are invaluable, but fortunately I ‘get’ more than my fair share of references, especially having grown up in the greater Boston area.
3. I am still behind the schedule by about a week. At Least I haven’t fallen further behind. The schedule doesn’t include the footnotes, so I feel better about this, especially since I just finished the seventeen and a half page footnote in half sized font of the phone call from Orin to Hal on the subject or Quebec separatism.
4. Wallace continues to blow me away with his ease in handling just about any style. The only section that doesn’t really work for me so far is pages 157-169, in which Hal’s grandfather tells Himself of his own ennis career, and how it ended, all while getting more and more inebriated. The conversations between Hal and Orin are hilarious.
5. The footnotes, while still entertaining, still do not seem entirely revelatory. At work yesterday someone was talking about how they wanted to read Nabokov but someone told them that Pale Fire was way too hard. Please. To me this just points to someone who will go on the rest of their life reading average fiction. These are the people still extolling the virtues of Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut (author’s who I enjoyed when I was 18 but thought were full of shit when I re-read them in my late 20’s). There’s a blurb on the back of R.M. Koster’s Tineblas trilogy that says something like, “After reading this, everything else will seem absolutely ordinary.” There are very few people out there working on this level…Pynchon, of course, Vollmann (especially the Seven Dreams series and The Royal Family), Richard Powers, some of Delillo, the David Mitchell of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. I am sure there are a few others that I’ll think of as soon as I post this, but the list is mighty small.
Infinite Summer
