Tío Steve's comments

Tío Steve's comments from the Books on the Nightstand group.

Note: Tío Steve is no longer a member of this group.

Good Lord, I had to edit in order to get Junot Díaz' name spelled correctly!

I did wish to add that I have not liked everything that I have read or attempted to read this year. Far from it. But let's keep it all positive here in this topic.

There is a tweener that is mentioned above though. That is My Name is Red. I am in a death struggle with this book. It's either this book or me. That's how grim I am. By that I mean that I am dogged. . . . .dogged as in little lines in my forehead. . . . .in my quest to determine whether the shortcomings are in this book or in me. Nobel Prize or no, Orhan Pamuk has either created a modern masterpiece here or one of the great phoney faux fables of all time. I have not been keeping any numerical score, but I can say that both the book and I are currently bloodied.

[Note alliteration above]

I return after an absence of some weeks and am glad to be back. This has been an absolutely brutal summer for me what with this and that. However, I return unbowed. . . . . .okay, I return only a tiny bit bowed.

In no particular order:

I listened to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on disk front to rear during a marathon drive to and from North Carolina. I believe this may have served to heighten the impact of this book. It is quite an original in my opinion. Although liking an author personally is not necessary for an appreciation of his or her work obviously, I find myself warming more and more to Junot Díaz as I hear him interviewed repeatedly.

My fondness for Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris puts me in a distinct minority among my closer online reading acquaintances. This was one of The New York Times' five best fiction works of 2007. I know this first novel has some problems, but I found it roundly entertaining. It is about an ad agency in the winter of its discontent and is written in a kind of Catch-22 tone of voice with characters who have a Catch-22 outrageousness about them, too.

And Mr. Pip. Wow! A really wonderful book, Summer. I got my recommendation here from Michael and Jon, and a great recommendation it was.

In the non-fiction category I list one of the amazing works of history that I have read in a while. It is an older book by Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August) called A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. The 14th Century in Europe boasted the Hundred Year’s War, the Crusades, and the Black Death, just to name a few of the attractions. Incredible book. Great historian.

Count me as one of the admirers of On Chesil Beach. This was my 2008 Ian McEwan. I read Atonement way back sometime. I cannot imagine how McEwan conceived the idea for this book. But then to have pulled it off was an amazing performance. I think some of the criticism of McEwan has arisen from literary jealousies hither and yon, comparable to what Martin Amis faced a few years ago. As far as I am concerned, Ian McEwan has earned every cent of that vast fortune that is pouring in on him.

Lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby's 1992 account of his own lifelong fascination with the Arsenal soccer team. This most certainly is not for everyone. It was a recommendation from my son, who is a soccer fanatic. I tried it and liked it.

Sorry about the length of this. I wanted to say a little bit about each of these rather than just throwing up the list.

She's not going to do it for you, Ann.

My numbers aren't too bad here, but that's because--let me confess it--I am an English major. Consequently, I was pushed into a good many of these, not that I regret it, mind you.

Count me out on The Magic Mountain, too. I have a nice edition of it with one of those classy, built-in ribbon book marks, but that book mark is never gonna move unless somebody else moves it someday.

There are several plays here. It has struck me in the past how relatively few really great American playwrights there are in relation, say, to great American novelists. I know that medium has less room for writers, but still. . . . .

Yes, men do sustain literary crushes, Ann. Mine is strange in a way. Years ago I got sweet on Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. This is strange because Hemingway has taken so much critical grief about his allegedly weakly portrayed female characters. But for some reason her half of the dialogue with Jake Barnes allowed me to fill in the blanks about her to the extent that I went head over heels. (Reading the good stuff is a participatory sport, you know. Not passive like movies or TV.)

Gawd! And there it is! The Crying of Lot 49. My nemesis!

As these things happen The New Yorker recently featured an excellent article on Chinua Achebe. You can find it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/bo...

Thanks only to my reading group, I have read Things Fall Apart. I bore a grudge against Mr. Achebe for some time because of his excellently argued opinion that certain favorites of mine from the "canon" were deeply racist works, for example, Heart of Darkness. Mr. Achebe never gave a bit of notice to me and went on to prosper.

An important work is not necessarily an entertaining work. However, I did find Things Fall Apart entertaining--so much so that I would be willing to read it again.

While we await the appearance of others. . . . . .

Yep, Jon, I have gotten downright curmudgeonly about this business of wasting time reading trash. So I am more than willing to allow somebody with taste like Michael or Ann to waste their lives wading through it for me. Actually, that is the primary role of a critic, is it not?

On a related note, I have a reading friend of whom I am very fond who is proud of the fact that she attended 87 movies in 2007. You could call her a cineaste, I think. But geez, stop to consider. She spent about a week of her life, 24/7, in a movie theater during the year. And you know that the vast, vast majority of those films were absolute dreck!

Just another of the many things I don't understand in my grumpy later years.

I just finished Mr. Pip, Michael and Jon. It is an extraordinary piece of work. I'll put up a review elsewhere.

Thank you.

I think the first that I might try is one that you mentioned, Michael. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones sounds very appealing to me.

I have listened to all the podcasts now and must say that you, Michael and Ann, come through my ear buds as two articulate and very, very nice folks, qualities that make for great sales reps and con artists.

I am a fiction reader primarily, but I am at a stage in life where I am wary of contemporary fiction and literally fearful of wasting any of the reading time left to me. As a result my tendency is to read or reread a classic rather than try something contemporary. In those cases where I had read the book about which one or the other of you commented in the podcasts, your comments were apropos and tracked with my own reaction. Therefore, I am going to trust you two to direct me to the good stuff. Please don’t take payoffs. Please don’t let me down.