reading - Wednesday!

What did you just finish reading?
Flamethrowers - was not that great, mostly because way too much of it was about the early eighties New York art scene of macho assholes, i.e. warmed-over Tama Janowitz, and I wasn't that big a fan of Tama when she was piping hot as a New York street pizza. The chapters about the narrator growing up in NV and seeing revolutionaries in Rome were great, though. I would have happily read many pages about Italy in the early eighties. I can tolerate assholes if they're Rothko or Cornell, but NYC too-hip-for-the-gallery art-as-performance just bores me. Also, Dwight Garner praised the dialogue, which BAFFLED me, because people go on far too long in a far too literary manner. One guy tells a terrible story at a DINNER PARTY which goes on for, I shit you not, about ten pages. It's like he thinks he's in Atlas Shrugged.

Cartwheel - was really good! You see from everyone's quite distinct POV except two major characters, which seemed off as I went along but then was explained basically by Plot Reasons near the end, but other than that, the pieces were really nicely joined together. The writing itself was very good, often terribly funny, especially the smartass quips of a damaged hipster boy grieving for his parents. The story is about how learning to see outside yourself is crucial to empathy, which sounds ABC After-School-Special-ish but was very well-done, and the book is partly an exercise in empathy itself -- everyone is 'sympathetic' (not likeable, or, God help us all, someone to root for): the accused, the murder victim, the parents, the prosecutor. Unlike Flamethrowers the dialogue in this book sounded like words spoken by real people. duBois wobbled a little on the did-she-or-didn't-she question, but the book was grounded enough in the mystery of real human experience, if that makes sense, that it wasn't annoying. More a literary novel about a crime than anything with genre trappings, which was fine. About the idea of dangerous American innocence, 'arrogant naivete' - the old Jamesian question I guess. But written in sentences you can actually read.

Room with a View - oy. Still not clicking for me, all these years later. It's like seeing an old college acquaintance at the ten-year reunion lunch and realizing you still detest them. I had to pretend this was maybe written by very early Virginia Woolf, because otherwise it sounded terribly arch. Lady Bracknell picks up a pen. And weirdly misogynistic, in a way (not anything specific -- it just sort of kept putting my hackles up). However, this was pretty well redeemed by having Emerson the Younger be a Manic Sparkle Pixie Dreamguy for Lucy (I adore Lucy). I have read some weird literary criticism about Lucy being a female authorial self-insert, and didn't Forster say he would no longer write fiction because he couldn't write het romance, and then we go off on the question of empathy again, and what about trying to write outside yourself? but at what point does denial of your own experience in order to conform to expectations, literary and social, become too creatively stifling? -- and would David Gilmour call Forster a Manly Man? Now that is really what we all want to know.

What are you reading now?
A truly terrible true-crime book about Amanda Knox.
No, really.

What do you expect to read next?
Another truly terrible true-crime book about Amanda Knox.
No, really. -- I know, I know. It's a sickness.