February 2006 Summary

I still have one review to post from my January reading, but I’m going to go ahead and post a summary of February.  I seem to have misplaced my copies of Saturday and Atonement, hence the delay.  While I continue to look for them, I will start working on some brief reviews of the following books:

William Tyndale: A Biography by David Daniell

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John C. Bogle

The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte (reviewed here with Perez Reverte’s The Club Dumas)

Fundamentalism and the Word of God by J.I. Packer

A shorter list than January’s, but February was a shorter month! This probably represents my most varied month of reading this year, so it should be fun to take another look at these books as I work on the reviews.

At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

Flann O’Brien was either mad or a genius.  Perhaps, as conventional wisdom has it regarding geniuses, a bit of both.  At-Swim-Two-Birds, a genre-defying work, was certainly little regarded when released.  The initial printing sold fewer than 250 copies in its first six months.   

Brian O’Nolan, who used Flann O’Brien as one of several pen names, was perhaps best known during his lifetime for his journalistic endeavors.  For some time he wrote a column for the Irish Times under a different pseudonym.  These columns are, by most accounts, nearly as eccentric as At-Swim-Two Birds.

This novel presents the reader with no small challenge.  The narrator, a drunken undergraduate, records his struggle to write a novel.  His novel, of course, is about another struggling novelist – this one named Trellis.  Though the narrator faces scorn from his uncle while writing his novel, Trellis, after a prolonged struggle to force his characters to conform to his wishes, finds that his own characters are plotting against his life.

In addition to the difficulties posed by three, occasionally collapsed into two, different levels of reality, some readers will find O’Brien’s style hard to follow.  He omits quotation marks and chapter divisions and, in the voice of his narrator, includes numerous non-sequiturs.  

Beyond the structural and stylistic difficulties, the narrator’s novelist’s novel is simply horrible (it also requires knowledge of Irish mythology, so read William Gass’s introduction in the Dalkey Archive edition and keep Google handy).  It is no wonder that Trellis’s characters revolt, though this terrible novel within a bad novel within an astounding novel also provides the book’s greatest humor.

All told, it’s a delightfully funny little book with its share of dull spots, some of which are intentional.  It served as my introduction to experimental fiction, and I greatly enjoyed it.  If you enjoy seeing a writer push the bounds of his times, you also may enjoy At-Swim-Two-Birds.

Lifetime Reading Plan?

Do I need a lifetime reading plan?  Do you?  Sometimes I think it would be helpful to plan my reading long in advance.  Sometimes I try to plan my reading months or a year in advance.  Always I fail to follow through on my plan.  I get bogged down in a multi-volume history or I get sidetracked by a contemporary novel that sends me careening off the plan and onto a fiction binge.  

So, as I (and you, I am sure) start to plan my 2007 reading, I thought I would brainstorm the advantages and disadvantages of lifetime reading planning.  Then I thought I would share that brainstorm below.  Add your thoughts via the comments and help me make up my mind.

Lifetime Reading Plan – Pros

• Finally!  A plan to tackle all of those unread books on the shelves.
• An excuse to increase the “to buy” list.
• An excuse to buy more of those books on the “to buy” list (“But I need it – I’m scheduled to read it in 2036!”)
• Provides a great answer to those embarrassing “Have you read . . . ?” questions. (“No, not yet.  I’m scheduled to read The Tale of Genji in 2015.”)
• Warm and fuzzy feeling guaranteed every time you read one and mark it off the list.

Lifetime Reading Plan – Cons

• How long is the lifetime going to be?
• What about the books still to be published between now and the end of my lifetime?  Isn’t it discrimination to ignore them?
• Can I really stick to a reading plan for more than a month at a time?
• May cause marital discord. (“You’d rather read two thousand books in the next thirty years than talk to me?”)
• If you finish all the books, does your life end early – sort of like the urban legend of hitting the bottom in a falling dream?

Bound to Please by Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize winning book critic for the Washington Post’s Book World, has collected in Bound to Please more than one hundred of his best essays from the past twenty-five years.  Though many critics are best known for their ability to shred a particularly loathsome work or to cut a literary giant down to size, Dirda reviews books he thinks he will enjoy and, as a result, rarely issues anything worse than a mixed notice.

In addition to this helpful approach, his pieces often draw widely on his knowledge of related works.  This enriches the experience of reading the essay and it gives the reader an even larger palette of potential reads coming out of the review.  Perhaps for this reason, Dirda prefers to be thought of as a “literary entertainer” rather than a critic.  But, his essays do excite even when he reviews a single work in a more conventional format; he has mastered the basic review tools of clear and concise plot summary, extensive use of quotation, and fine book selection. 

This selectiveness is perhaps most surprising because Dirda reads and reviews widely.  He ventures so far beyond the respectable bounds of litfic – even into the slums of SF and YA – that he at first seems undiscriminating.  Such is not at all the case.  Dirda is extremely discriminating.  He recognizes the conventions of various genres and expects books to demonstrate merit relative to their peers.

Certainly no critic has more profoundly impacted my reading than Michael Dirda.  I have read at least a dozen books so far in 2006 based on his recommendations, and many more of his suggestions are on my “to read” list.  Even if these essays don’t populate your “to read” list, they are delightful enough on their own to warrant reading at either leisurely or break-neck pace.

The Club Dumas and The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Both The Club Dumas and The Nautical Chart are enjoyable novels, but because neither is a monumental work and because I am not making much progress toward my goal of catching up with my current reading, this will necessarily be a short summary.

Both novels are mysteries, though a little smarter than your average thriller – and much more skillfully written.  The Club Dumas requires and rewards literary knowledge (specifically, knowledge of Alexandre Dumas, père and his The Three Musketeers) in a way that makes it the more satisfying book.

In The Club Dumas, Perez-Reverte sets a rare book dealer on a chase against time and unknown others to both authenticate a Dumas manuscript and track down a book that purportedly contains the secret to summoning the devil.  The book dealer finds himself swept into circumstances that parallel The Three Musketeers.  Readers familiar with that novel may find some of Perez-Reverte’s work spoiled, though my memory of the Dumas was faint enough to preserve suspense. 

One striking similarity between The Club Dumas and The Nautical Chart is the use in both books of a narrator who is both part of the story, yet apart from it.  The narrators of both books clearly indicate when they lack knowledge to inform the reader and they even note when knowledge came to them later than the point at which they include it in the narrative.  The really enjoyable part though is that the narrator is not revealed until the end and then with a wink and a flourish.  I have encountered this device before, but cannot say precisely where – perhaps in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  Those that enjoy Zafon or the fiction of Umberto Eco may also enjoy Perez-Reverte.

The Nautical Chart is decidedly inferior to The Club Dumas, but still far better than anything a Dan Brown can hope to write.  In this novel, the setting is the Iberian peninsula and the object of the search is, well, treasure!  Instead of an intrepid book dealer, we follow an intrepid ship’s captain; instead of paralleling Dumas, we parallel a doomed ship’s last voyage.  It is an interesting novel, but the hackneyed romance was too prominent for my tastes.  I would recommend the novel, but not as broadly or quickly as I would The Club Dumas.