my floor as a mood chartMy moods, their ups and downs, become obvious when I look at my changing relationship to books. At my best, I’m reading them. At my worst, I’m avoiding them. Usually, depressed but optimistic, I’m buying them; I can easily mistake buying them for possessing them, assign their physical presence intellectual effects. It’s a parody of consumerism, or maybe consumerism perfected: I’ve turned the self-as-art of dandyism into a self-as-acquisitions. And, of course, this is the fake change that depressives love best.
Someone, in the comments on a recent post, encouraged me to start reviewing the books I read. I’d love to, except that, even when I read the books I buy, I rarely finish them. Here’s a list of the books discarded around my apartment. I won’t even bother with the book shelves.
Partly read, with length of time since last read
office floor: Milan Kundera’s Ignorance (4 months), Rick Moody’s The Black Veil (3 months), (ed.) Leila Sebbar’s An Algerian Childhood (1 year), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (repeated efforts to read first chapter and convince myself I like it every 6 months), Gary Lutz’ Stories in the Worst Way (7 months), Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease (1 month)
living room floor: George Vaillant’s The Wisdom of the Ego (3 weeks), Michel de Montaigne’s The Complete Essays (1 month)
bedroom floor: Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight (3 weeks), Kate Moses’ Wintering (1 year), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1 year), Jorge Borges’ Other Inquisitions (1 year), Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies (1 month), Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime (2 weeks)
Unread, and when bought
office floor: Armand Marie Leroi’s Mutants (4 months ago), Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories (on sale for $2 — last week), Daniel Amen’s Healing ADD (last week), Edward Hallowell and John Ratey’s Driven to Distraction (last week), Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (last week)
desk: P. Mansell Jones’ French Introspectives: From Montaigne to André Gide (4 months ago)
living room floor: latest issue of Fence (2 weeks ago), Jennifer Vanderbes’ Easter Island (1 month ago), Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (5 months ago), J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (5 months ago)
bedroom floor: Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce (2 weeks ago), Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (1 month ago), Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (4 months ago)
currently reading
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (re-reading), John Haskell’s I am not Jackson Pollock., Deborah Levy’s Pillow Talk in Europe
I used to share an office with someone, and I could tell whenever she was close to the breaking point: all of her desk drawers would be open.
I want to read the Sebbar. The Baker I loved. The Klein book has such a great title.
Posted by Sam at March 3, 2004 10:14 AMFound the Mezzanine incredibly annoying but that was about six years ago. Let me know if you fare any better with it.
Posted by TEV at March 3, 2004 11:28 AMOmigod. You are terrifying. 12 years of therapy in two sentences. Where should I send the check?
Posted by Bibliomane at March 3, 2004 11:50 AMTEV, I was tempted to say about the Baker, “I loved it when it came out,” but I’m glad I didn’t. Looking at it again now, I still love it. To my mind, Mezz was brilliant, Room just ok, U&I very funny, Vox appalling, Fermata appalling, and Box just ok. Nory I haven’t read.
Posted by Sam at March 3, 2004 12:10 PMGiven the number of unread or partially read volumes, “Daniel Amen’s Healing ADD (last week), Edward Hallowell and John Ratey’s Driven to Distraction (last week)” seem particularly telling.
I say this, but I am just as guilty.
Posted by Nathan at March 3, 2004 12:26 PMThank God I’m not the only person to read the opening chapter of “The Hours” and consider joining Virginia Wolfe for a nice, long bath.
Posted by Weaver at March 3, 2004 01:21 PMWhat can I say? I’m a sucker for Baker and his obsession with prurience and details.
The writer I can’t stand is Paul Auster, for the reasons that B.R. Myers states. He WISHES he was Beckett.
And “Middlesex” was about as compelling a middlebrow 600 page novel as they make ‘em. I knocked that puppy off in three nights. Couldn’t stop reading it. If you get really depressed from Mann, it’s a good tonic.
Posted by Ed at March 3, 2004 01:50 PMI’m quite ashamed to admit that I’ve had Midnight’s Children ever since the first day of publication all those years ago. And I _still_ haven’t read it.
All reading ceased about 18 months ago and I’m still waiting for it to come back. I keep buying books, just in case, at the rate of two or three a week, but they’re just going to end up driving us out of house and home.
Posted by qB at March 3, 2004 03:48 PMHey Sam & Ed.
Gave up on Baker after that one; it just felt like a lot of minutae in search of substance, but I still have my copy so, given my respect for ya both, I’ll take another looksee. Got Middlesex on the shelf, too, and Ed’s kicked that one up a notch.
Part of my reader bias is I don’t like clever for clever’s sake - it’s why I don’t like Amis’ fiction and why I can’t stand Eggers. Baker felt like that to me at the time. But who knows - we age, we mellow, we take second looks.
Posted by TEV at March 3, 2004 04:53 PMMark: Just curious: was it Kingsley or Martin?
I feel the same way about writers being overtly clever or unreasonable. But, for me, there are odd distinctions. I can’t stand Eggers because he repeats phrases, structures his sentences as if he’s Jackson Pollock (when Eggers ultimately has nothing substantial to say), and relies too much on pop cultural references. But by contrast, even when I’m vaguely comprehending his wares (i.e., “Everything and More”), David Foster Wallace rocks my world. And I think it has something to do with how authors perceive the world around them and what they decide to put on paper.
The thing about Baker is that it’s really fascinating to see him get into the snapping of a shoelace, or describe details about staplers. He reminds us that there are basic things around us that we often overlook in life. But a lot of people seem to detest that insane level of scrutiny. But I think Baker’s ultimately commenting upon that dwindling in perception. (Remember, if you’ve read “Double Fold,” that Baker’s a hardcore preservationist.) And I find it interesting that Baker’s a love/hate kind of author for people.
I gave up on Rushdie after “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” The only two Rushdie books you should bother with are “Midnight’s Children” and “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” The rest are repeats retreads resurgences of the same tired template.
(Sorry, Chicha, for rambling.)
Posted by Ed at March 3, 2004 06:55 PMMarty. Definitely Marty.
And I agree with you on Rushdie pretty much 100%.
What I find I gravitate toward is writers like Banville, who also pore over minutae but it’s internal, the minutae of the emotional landscape versus the minutae of paper clips and radial tyres. Since I’m a self-involved egomaniac, the former appeals to me over the latter.
Hey N., thanks for the real estate …
Ed,
Paul Auster, maybe he is stretching to BE Beckett, but from his poetry (complete works recently published) it seems his impetus to write (from the telling of his origins in his poetry), Auster’s work tells of an absolute, whereas Beckett, as Harold Pinter(Http://www.haroldpinter.org) points out, is avoiding such post-modern pitfalls. Through the plenitude of significaiton, Auster’s poems stretch toward an absolute beyond in the silences between words-his prose works toward the same goal. He is greatly influenced by the works of the poet Edmund Jabe who does very similar things in poetry and prose.
I realized, reading these comments, that the books on my floor don’t just lay out my moods, but my past relationships with the books’ authors. For ex., Baker: I read the shamefully bad Vox in college, and since then have avoided him. Eugenides: I loved Virgin Sucides, but it ruined my writing style for a month, and, with a thesis deadline coming up, I’m not taking any risks. Auster: giving him another chance, since I like his more critical nonfiction. Rhys: Wide Sargossa Sea, I hate that book. Kundera: I used to be a huge fan, but Immortality annoyed me.
And, yes, I hope the ADD books will be helpful, if I ever get to them.
Posted by Nathalie Chicha at March 4, 2004 01:44 AMMaybe you and I should go to the river and toss our unreadable copies of The Hours in. We could put stones in their pockets….
May I borrow that Zizek on Lacan? It sounds awesome.
not that it’s all about me, but what the hell, let’s make it all about me. nathalie, PLEASE read elizabeth costello asap b/c i’ve been dying to talk about it with someone and no one’s read it. it’s making me nuts.
Posted by michelle at March 4, 2004 12:39 PMall this time i thought auster was struggling to become borges!
Posted by Kelly at May 13, 2004 11:34 AM.
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