Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted

Chuck Palahniuk is king of the saleable gross-out. This guy made his name with Fight Club -- an extreme descent into the do-nothing, thirty-something generation that has little more than Simpsons quotes and dry wit to bond over -- and has tried to outdo himself on the excrete-o-meter ever since. (Case in point: Invisible Monsters, where a distraught model blows off her own jaw to explore the other side of the beauty myth. Case in point: Choke, in which sex addicts prey on weaklings, including each other, in a search for some sort of fulfillment.

In Haunted, Palahniuk doesn't merely give us one social screwup; he gives us more than 20. They all pack themselves, And Then There Were None-style, into an abandoned theatre for a writers' retreat. Of course, the bodies, and the body parts, pile up shortly after that alley door clicks shut.

Enjoy. Just don't read chapter one over lunch. Yeuch.

Robertson Davies - Fifth Business

My knowledge of Canadian literature is admittedly weak, which has recently spawned a trek down must-read lane. My fave so far has got to be Chester Brown's decision to tackle Louis Riel's life story as a graphic novel.

Fifth Business, which I finished reading today, was my first foray into the good work of Mr Robertson Davies, and I have to say it was rather enjoyable (from a dusty-academic-reading-obviously-dated-classic point of view). 

Dunstable (really, "Dunstable"?) Ramsay is, well, a dusty academic writing his life story in an obviously dated way. His life is unremarkable, insomuch as the average person is unremarkable. He went to war, where he lost his leg and fancied that he witnessed a miracle. He returned to Canada lead the life of a bachelor, witness to his best friend becoming both a womanizing adulterer and an astonishingly wealthy man. He followed his passion to write a couple of academically successful books, and subsequently to meet a few eccentrics along the way. Oh, and he just happened to inspire the greatest magician of the modern age. Dan Brown this ain't. But that's a good thing.

Davies's work, at least here, is wonderfully complex in its layering; repeated readings will no doubt present miracles of interpretation. I look forward to the next tome in the trilogy, The Manticore.

Quote of the day

"Potential events are often more important than real events."

-- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

Luminescent intestinal tracks

"I hope no one is offended by the concept of glowing bowels."

-- Sean Cullen, Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates

What doth maketh the boy?

"A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain -- in short, a man. Oh, these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!"

-- Robertson Davies as Dunstan 'Corky' Ramsay in Fifth Business

Keepin' on with the book readin' thang...

They did so over a year ago, but hey, I've never claimed to be on top of things. The UK's Association of Librarians & Museum-ians who put it together. Each person was asked, "What is one book every adult should read before they die?" These were the 30 top vote-getters (in order, apparently).

Lists are predictably controversial. As this is a British poll, it's unsurprising that The Bible's represented but (apart from the very preachy Life of Pi) there are exactly zero alternative religious texts -- but as a Greek classics hobbyist, it's disappointing that Austen & Bronte have shown up Homer & Virgil. And hey, Dickens and Golding I get, Steinbeck even -- but how does the lone Canadian entry end up being Kenneth Graham??!?!? No Atwood? No Ondaatje? No Leacock? Apologies to Mr Hardy, but Tess of the D'urbervilles does NOT outrank Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Oscar Wilde's exclusion is criminal; equally sad is their naming Winnie the Pooh over, say, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Richard Adams' outstanding Watership Down.

All complaints aside, there's not a volume here I'd turn away out of spite. Turns out I'm 33% finished my pre-death reading assignments. I've read 10 of these, and marked them with asterisks.

1. *To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

2. The Bible 

3. *The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
4. *
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

5. *A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
6. *
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. *
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
8. 
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque

9. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman

10. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
11. 
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

12. *The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

14. *Tess of the D'urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
15. 
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne

16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

17. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham

18. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
19. *
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
20. 
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

21. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

22. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
23. 
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

24. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 

25. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
26. 
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

27. Middlemarch by George Eliot
28. 
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

29. *A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

30. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Books, books and more books

I've always liked books, although I probably talk a bigger game than I actually play. I mean, I read and everything, but I'm not as well-read in the classics area as I probably should be. This year, I finally hit my goal of sitting down to read, cover to cover, at least 50 books in a calendar year; unlike the original 50 Book Challenge that I got the idea from, I include graphic novels, online books and non-fiction books in the total. I didn't count magazines, articles, essays or websites.

Of the 50-some books I kept track of this year:
- 19 were traditional novels of fiction
- 14 were graphic novels
- 8 were straight up children's books (15 if you count the Harry Potter series)
- 9 were non-fiction
- 2 were online publications
- 4 were purely academic reads (essay compilations for a Latin American history course)
- 8 more were books for courses that (luckily) doubled as pleasure reading
- 6 were classics (7 if you include the English Patient)
- 14 were repeat reads, not including multiple reads necessary for writing papers for courses

Some books fall under more than one category, of course, so if you're trying to get me on shaky math, nyah, nyah, nuh-nyah, nyah.


I normally don't get involved in memes, but here's one I grabbed from the ever-impressive erin-go-blog:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. This list has not been adapted, nor edited, by me -- I've just followed the rules for bolding and such. I haven't hated any of them, but here are the rules, loathing instructions included...

Unfinished Book-ness Meme
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but haven't been able to finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey****
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad**
The Blind Assassin
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein**
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
Emma
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984*****
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels (In fact I blogged at length about it.)
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves**
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid*
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*********** (I lost count, but it's a lot -- it's a great book to use for high advanced ESL students.)
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

literary nepotism

The actual name of this phenomenon escapes me at the moment, but I love when a writer references another work in their fiction. It's not just that I enjoy seeing how one artist influences another -- Homer's Odyssey directly or indirectly inspiring Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, or even Spielberg's Indiana Jones -- although that's fascinating in its own right. Rather, I enjoy when an author has a character read or somehow become involved with a story within that story. Por exemplo:

"She opens The Last of the Mohicans to the blank page at the back and begins to write in it.

There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father's. I have always loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father.

She closes the book and then walks down into the library and conceals it in one of the high shelves."

-- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

In writing this brief episode, how does Ondaatje's choice of book inform his audience? Would the reader interpret this differently if Ondaatje had instead written about Hana scribbling in The Jungle Book or Jane Eyre? Would Lady Chatterley's Lover have been too racy a reference, distracting the reader unnecessarily, or perhaps over-sexualizing her observations about this older man? As the English Patient himself collects clippings in Herodotus' Histories, would it have been hopelessly elitist to depict Hana defacing a copy of The Iliad?

Things become even more complicated once we start asking whose choice it was in the first place: if we argue Ondaatje's the one who chose that tome, we're asking all kinds of metalingual questions. He picked that book for the literary references inherent in the years that have passed after James Fenimore Cooper published the novel. To imply a connection between a sympathizer to a conquered people and Ondaatje's own Caravaggio. For the simplicity of borrowing an entire text's popular relevance without having to weigh down his own text even further.

If, however, one supposes that Hana, the character, chose the book, the connections become less about Ondaatje's cleverness, and more about his character's completeness. Does she make a deliberate move to place this journal entry in this volume, or is it mere random chance? Earlier in the novel, we are told that Hana has little if any literary knowledge; are we then supposed to guess that she's been educated by her experience, enough to understand the complexity of her choice? Or should we attach a pseudo-schoolgirl naivete to it, that "oh-it's-just-so-romantic" squeal that belies true understanding of a deeper text?

As a writer, as a teacher, hell, as a lover, I know it's the little things that make all the difference. Here, and a nod is needed to rebobadob's The Luck Key, this is a case of the tiniest detail colouring an entire text. Literally.

The Italian Secretary - Caleb Carr

Caleb Carr wrote a book a few years back (1994) a wonderfully dark portrait of a doctor playing detective in turn-of-the-century New York City. Dr. Lazlo Kreizler is a dark protagonist whose methods of investigation -- tainted as they are with such unholy things as the scientific method and psychological profiling -- are scoffed at by local law enforcement. Picture if you will Silence of the Lambs, about 20 years prior to World War I. Kreizler's efforts to catch the world's first recognized serial killer are buoyed only by his street rats, a social leper in the form of a sensationalist newspaper writer, and a relationship with his old school chum, New York City Police Chief Theodore Roosevelt.

The Alienist was a revelation of sorts, turning me on to contemporary historical fiction and inspiring me to walk through their inspirations.

While Carr's work since then has disappointed -- in both the sequel to the Alienist (The Angel of Darkness) and his attempt at futuristic espionage (Killing Time) the man seemed enamored with his own smarts -- it was with not a little bit of excitement that I picked up The Italian Secretary, his authorized foray into Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's signature character. Sherlock Holmes is ably portrayed, but the pattern has, alas, persisted. Carr's insistence upon showing off just how clever he is ruins any chance he had at getting it right.

You see, Mr Carr, Conan Doyle succeeded only because he made Holmes look clever, without bringing attention to his own cognitive abilities as a writer. No one walks away from an Agatha Christie masterpiece with a nagging feeling that she was showing off; Christie's characters, rather than Christie herself, show guile; her stories are smart; her plot twists are without peer.

Marvel 1602

I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's post-Sandman endeavour, entitled Marvel 1602 due to the simple fact that he's taken the Marvel universe and plunked it firmly in the final year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. 1602, to be precise.

Well-written, and a fun spin on the whole Jack Kirby/Stan Lee character empire. Mutants are called Witchbreed, and are hunted by the Inquisition.

Strangely, the character I'm most into is Daredevil, all-too brooding and self-absorbed in his usual incarnation; here a blind minstrel with a penchant for one-liners.

A fun read, I must say, especially necessary for me right now, since most of the time these days I'm knee-deep in non-fiction Latin American history or fighting through intense Shakespearean analyses.



Oh, and did I mention the bitchin' scratchboard covers by Scott McKowen? They're, well, bitchin'.