My Library is Up at Librarything

I have entered all of my books at library thing. There is a total of 773 items, of which 147 are audiobooks and 626 are books. Should take like, what, say five years to finish? Maybe that is a tall order given that I have to read all three of my copies of Ulysses.

My books are a diverse lot. I am sure there are collections more diverse. But mostly I have quality literature, decent history and some philosophy and science fiction thrown in.

The Mass Ends

I finished A Mass for the Dead. What a strange and rare and moving book! It is a book that aims to be heavy-handed and yet isn't. I loved the way Gibson never dressed up his characters to make us appreciate how funny and special they were. Gibson is a playwright by trade but the book has no traditional scenes with drama and rising action and a bullshit climax. He relays a series of anecdotes and let us appreciate what is special about his parents. This a nearly 400 page monologue/prose poem.

The theme of the book is delivered in one of the closing chapters. After rejecting faith in religion, art and the self, Gibson concludes the following:

"I believe in my parents. I believe in my parents, therefore, in myself, therefore, in my children. I believe in my parent, and in life everlasting." (page 349)

Something to think about in an age where a new global generation is showing less interest in family, choosing fun or careers or art or money to believe in. Gibson's book may not be destined to be read but it is certain to become a stranger and stranger relic with every passing year.

11 Days into A Mass

I am reading A Mass for the Dead at a snail's pace, but I am enjoying the book immensely. According to my notes, I started the book on September 9th, which was eleven days ago. I am now on page 300, with 93 more to go.

In fairness, I did leave the book at The Job this past weekend so I lost three of my most productive reading nights.

Still, even if you give me eight days that only amounts to about 37 pages a day. This is not a pace to rack up an impressive list of complete books for the year.

But this book is not designed to be a page turner. It is a positing a religion of the family told through anecdotes. It is about a New York intellectual who broke completely from his Depression era working class family to discover he had never left:

"Hope out of hope, they do come again like leaves, and after so many deaths the tree is still prodigal; of the ten children brought forth by my aunts and uncles five lived and brought forth ten more, the three oldest of these have been fruitful with another seven, and my sister and I with four. It is half a century since a child in the clan died, and with every birth the tale, not yet finished, begins anew. Let my tongue not be prudent, it wishes to remember the vexations and ennui of that daily prose which is family life, but I am talking of salvation."

This is not a book to knock in three days. To do so would be sacrilege.

The Lacuna: Mexican History for Name Droppers

I am currently listening to the Lacuna in my car on the way back and forth from The Job. Barbara Kingsolver is a heavyweight author, seriously schooled in both science and history. She likes telling big stories about likable characters in challenging times. She is a very conventional novelist. She is also very much a leftist, which I don't mind, and this bleeds through her books, but does make them a bit predictable.

She is the reader/performer of this audiobook version of her novel. Not sure how I feel about that. I want to listen to poets recite their poetry on tape. Ditto short story writers. But the novelist seems to wear  out her welcome over the course of ten hours. I would rather Kingsolver be the imposing force she is offstage, looming over the novel, while a pro delivers a performance. At times, Kingsolver's narration has a forced librarian at children's story time quality to it. Again, that voice works at readings but not over ten hours. These are magical words, the voice insists.

The Glue of the family is guilt

"It was not the neighbors on that first day of long pants I kept sprinting around the corner to outrun, it was my unworthy self, who lived in my parents' house. Almost everything they put their hands to, from my father's sorting of letters at midnight far downtown to my mother's three day kneading of dough for the brioche rolls I loved, had at heart the growth of the two children who were their chief business in life; now mine was to escape them. Though once a month I would kneel to confide myself to the priest's jowl in the dark of booth, an instinct was at work in me to devise my own kind of communion, and all he heard from me was that I had said two damns since my last confession. The secret I could not name, or know, was that I was forsaking my parents."

Pages 118-119, A Mass for the Dead by William Gibson

Book #1: Break Up the Family: William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead

"You say, break up the family,
and let's begin to live our lives."
 
                  --Morrissey

I have started A Mass for the Dead, by William Gibson. No, it is not the cyberpunk Gibson, but the now largely dustbinned playwright from the 50s and 60s.

The book, published first in 1968, is a memoir of his family, a doomed and interesting group of poor Irish Americans. Set in pre-War Harlem and the Bronx, it recreates a people so different from us they could have lived in another millennium much less a century. Here the bonds of family were all and destiny was decided in your teens when you married. People were more conservative and trapped but also more reckless. They were full of fear, but also joy.

The paperback edition I have (see above) has three pages of effusive praise from the critics after the title page. Lewis Mumford proclaims it, "One of the few books of our time that will still deserve reading a century hence." Well, Gibson's memoir is nearing the mid-century mark and it is out-of-print and largely unread. You can't buy a new copy at Amazon. At library thing only sixty members list it in their collections, and only one has reviewed it. To be fair, Mumford did say "deserve" to be read, not "will" be read a in 2040.

And as I hit the 100 page mark, I find myself in total agreement. The book is a memoir in the best sense, not a story of the author but of the dead family members who haunt him.

Gibson's prose is masterful. Feelings are never described. We get anecdotes and stories strung together in the dream-like quality of memory. Not a sentence rings false. There is nothing canned or embellished for dramatic effect. One of my favorites: his father methodically squeezing to pulp a bunch of bananas after an argument with his stubborn mother, then calming down and setting out into the evening streets in search of an open fruit stand to replenish the family's supply. We don't get the subject of the fight; Gibson was six and did not recall it and would not invent one. Gibson does not comment on the scene, apologize or condemn. He describes it and moves on.

And the Loopholes Begin...

Reading over my rules I neglected a key loophole to rule number five, which is as follows:

5. I will read one book at a time.

I see this rule as important. I spent a while recently at the post on Hemingway's personal library over at  library thing. A quote from a Hemingway biography states that he was, no surprise, a voracious reader, and that he usually had about eight to ten books going at once. I think this may be fairly common for serious readers of challenging books. If you are knocking out neat little genre novels one after the other, it is easy, maybe necessary, to keep them in a tight domino line. But if you are reading non-shite books, philosophy, biographies, serious novels, poetry, you may need to switch it up. Call it a recharging of the batteries.  A cleansing of the literary palette.

Reading should not be a chore, the compulsive book changer argues. The moment you find a book tiresome or repetitive or offensive, this is the time to put it down. A bad movie will cost you only two hours of your life. A bad book can demand eight to ten hours of free time depending on the size of the book and the speed at which you read. This doesn't even take into account the differences in mental energy reading demands over viewing. This is too much good reading time after bad. So slip a bookmark into that volume and draw another from the stack. No one is watching.

But maybe all the shuffling it is just rank dilettantism, which may be fine, even necessary, for most writers of fiction. However, I suspect most books are not abandoned because they are so horrible, but rather because the reader assumes greener literary pastures between the next cover. Also, there is that initial rush of a new read, the power of selection or election, then the effortless rush of the first fifty pages. In any reading effort, even in great books, the middle third is the slog, and where jumping ship is easiest.

I believe having a list, even an unrealistic, unwieldy one like mine, which forsakes all other books, is an antidote to mindless book hopping. For me, every one of the millions of books ever written are no longer before me, just the 700-odd on my list. I can calmly move from book to book, savoring those meant to be savored, learning from those with something to teach and, yes, suffering through those that offer little else. I think this is the formula for a truly enjoyable and rewarding reading life.

Oh yeah, and now the loophole. I am permitted to read one book at a time and listen to one audiobook at a time in my car. The audiobooks are for my 40-minute drive to The Job.