Knowing my ABCs

For awhile my job was subjecting me to near-functional illiteracy- I'm so busy I stagger home like a zombie, cook dinner, chat, and fall asleep after watching whatever episode of South Park the F-word downloaded. One good thing about the hours and hours of travelling from that last trip to Canada was being able to wallow through books like a pig in tasty, tasty shit.

1. City of Glass, Paul Auster. I want to like Paul Auster because Smoke and Blue in the Face were such great movies and because he was recommended by Dale, whose blog I can read until I'm blue in the face, but I just don't, at least on the basis of The Brooklyn Follies and this book.

One thing City of Glass has in common with Brooklyn Follies is that they both have really great titles. Somehow that just makes it worse for me that the novels themselves aren't better. The ideas he plays with are fun but his characters are so wooden, so stock, so unbelievable as creatures - I wish he'd just write essays. City of Glass was extra annoying because he introduced himself as a non-omniscient character in it, and I hate when people do that. Makes me think of Martin Amis and then I'm in a bad mood.

2. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, A.S. Byatt. This was a re-read - I had to re-read it when I leant it to a friend, who then wanted to talk about it, and I couldn't because I didn't remember a damn thing. That's great. I hope I forget it again so I can read it afresh again. Marketed as fairy tales for grownups, but actually about the same level of sex and violence you'd find in the source material for Disney, besides the eponymous novella in the collection which has slightly more sex perhaps, and with a genie no less, which is hot.

The shorter stories are charmingly told without Margaret Atwood-style heavy-handedness, and the novella has that yummy A.S. Byatt charm of playing with delightful, abstract or difficult ideas within an engaging, beautiful narrative structure that was so evident in Morpho Eugenia, the novella that got turned into the vastly inferior Angels and Insects . . . Paul Auster, take note . . .

3. After Dark, Haruki Murakami. Japanese deliciousness. It goes somewhere inside the reader without going anywhere at all, really. Short, seemingly slight, and yet each secondary character is so well delineated they don't seem like secondary characters . . . each coincidence so well written there doesn't seem to be a coincidence . . . Paul Auster, take more notes. I have to write an extended review of this one to keep getting free books, so I'll give the hollas a rest for now, but it's great.

4. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. So fucking good. I'd read David Golder before and not really liked it, besides the great scene at the end, so I was thinking this would be more free-book-getting-duty-reading, but no. No no. Rough draft of two parts of a planned four or five part epic, that reads better than most books that get all the time they need. If someone handed it to me without telling me that, I wouldn't have been able to tell, I don't think. Doesn't feel like it ends up lickety-split. Charlotte Bronte-ish in how the descriptive passages surpass the dialogue, though the dialogue is good, and yet so very Russian in its scope, and so very harsh on the decline of the French.

It sounds trite to say it's a tragedy she wasn't able to finish it, when the death of the dimmest dimbulb in the Holocaust was a greater tragedy than a mere book getting abandoned. But I will say I hate the French a little more than I did before for allowing this woman's death before the epic was finished. She was writing at the height of her powers and it would have been a classic, a staggering classic, and it probably already is.