Readsday!

YES, IT'S STILL READSDAY, SHUT UP. Every day is Readsday! Every single day!

.....in my personal timezone, anyway.

What did you just finish reading?
Just reread Hangsaman from start to finish in its spiffy new Penguin Classics edition, which I bought to treat myself -- the paperback I bought used when I was twenty or so has this horrible cover. It was as chilling and beautiful and unsettling as ever, like nearly every damn thing Shirley Jackson ever wrote. She must have revised like a motherfucker.  It's so wonderful to see her getting just a little of the acclaim and worship she deserves -- more than thirty years after her death. Hi ho. -- I think what awes me most is how precise her writing is: not just that no single word is wasted, but she picks exactly the right word, or combinations of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, so that it's not so much like reading a book or even hearing a story but being entirely caught up in someone else's waking dream. Her narrative voice, her descriptive style, her characterizations, everything about her writing is as if she never had a doubt about it in her life -- which can't really be true, she was after all human, but damn, she's just amazing. Even though it's been mumblemumble years since I read it through, I found there were whole passages I knew almost by heart, as if they were music.

(Apparently a big problem people have with this novel, to judge from the whining, is that it's not clear enough whether or not the Imaginary Friend is real. This makes me wonder if they've ever read anything else by Jackson -- espeecially Hill House. The point is not whether or not Tony is real, or Eleanor is "doing this all by herself," or if the apocalypse really is outside the door, but that the perspective shifts equally and dizzyingly from yes to no; that is the point, that our perceptions are subjective and we can never be as sure about what is real, and what is imagined, as we think we can be. That this is expressed in the clearest possible language, and the most confident manner, is fittingly almost just like another twist for the reader.)

What are you reading now?
Digital Vertigo (which I keep perpetually mistyping as Digital Vortex), in a probably vain attempt to disentangle myself from the parts of the Web I regularly participate in - mainly Tumblr, GoodReads, and too often, Twitter. I never got into Facebook (frankly, the interface is too ugly and confusing), successfully divorced myself from IM (in the process grievously offending three or four former friends: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T WANT ME TO BE ABLE TO GET HOLD OF YOU ALL THE TIME), and I tend to just upload-and-run on Flickr, but I need to unplug. All that liking and reblogging and retweeting is making me stupid. Focusing so much on other peoples' content is preventing me from, in the horrible phrasing of the day, generating my own, and that makes me unhappy.  The author is far too full of himself and name-drops nearly every other paragraph and his thoughts aren't half as profound as he thinks they are, but it's amusing enough to thumb through. I am taking perverse satisfaction in reading this on the Kindle.

What do you expect to read next?
As always it's hard to say -- I'd like to get out of the nonfiction rut I feel I've been in this year, and read interesting novels -- something challenging. I used to almost never read nonfiction, and then I got really fucking sick of the late stages of Mailer and Updike and Roth (oh my) and the critical sucking-up to them, and then there was horrible Literary Minimalism, and then there was utter crap like The Corrections, and I just couldn't stand it anymore. But now people are praising Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter again! and there's Aimee Bender and Kelly Link and other neat new writers! so I don't have to just hide with Woolf and Murdoch anymore. You young people who can read zombie novels without being laughed at* today** don't know how good you have it.


*Much.

**Altho I knew a Classicist who claimed one of the Roman histories -- Suetonius, I think? -- basically was a post-apocalyptic zombie tale.