Two books
I finished a couple of books today, and I'm sure the library was pleased to have them back, along with their $5 in late fees, as apparently I'm not smart enough to renew online.
I picked up Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart because Jessica Lee Jernigan said that it was her favorite book of 2005, and because I liked the title and the cover (I firmly believe in judging a book by its cover, by the way, but that's another post entirely). Having now finished it, I'm not sure I understand. It's an interesting concept: at the moment of the first nuclear test in the United States, the three fathers of the atomic bomb--J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard--are transported to 2003, and are whisked off on many adventures, eventually heading off to Washington on a crusade to end nuclear proliferation. I can get behind that part, even though the time-travel element makes me fundamentally nervous. Millet has clearly done her homework, and she's spiked her novel with some truly horrifying facts about America's nuclear history. If she had written nonfiction, she would clearly have done an excellent job. As a novelist, though, I think she got bogged down in trying to be satiric and lyrical, all at the same time, and forgot to tell a compelling story. She starts off well enough, but the characters--with the exception of Fermi, to whom she manages to do some justice--never really become more than sketches and/or stereotypes, and the plot gets kind of vague towards the middle (and never fully recovers). There are some funny parts, but most of the comedy is based on further stereotyping of hippies, and I sort of feel like she could have done better. The verdict: Decent writing of a muddly plot. Certainly not a bad novel, but it could have been better.
My library copy of OPARH (not to be confused with OPRAH) was big and heavy, so on days when I didn't feel like lugging it around, I carried a copy of Margaret Atwood's newest release, The Tent. It's a series of "fictional essays," which are essentially snippets of short stories, bits and pieces of writing that are interesting, but not interconnected in any way. I mostly liked it: if nothing else, Atwood is a good writer, and there's not much else to say about it. She's clever, and she's funny, and she's insightful in a way that's really kind of wonderful. I love what she does with words. On the other hand, I have to admit that I forgot most of the pieces approximately five minutes after I read them. They're hard to read one after another, because it feels bad to not give each piece its due time and thought, but it also feels bad to stop every three pages, which is about the average length of each piece. So they blur together and eventually become a block of pretty text that's all mushed together in my head, never to be remembered again. Also, I wish I could find a publisher to pay me to publish scraps from my writing notebook. Because that's totally what this is. Nice scraps, though.
Now I'm feeling a little bit of literary ennui--I literally have 25 books sitting unread on the living room floor, and I got three more at the library today (Writers on Writing, Comfort Me With Apples, and America's Best Crime Writing 2004), and I still can't decide what's next. I need some off-ui, and maybe a recommendation or two, if anybody has anything I simply must read.
I picked up Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart because Jessica Lee Jernigan said that it was her favorite book of 2005, and because I liked the title and the cover (I firmly believe in judging a book by its cover, by the way, but that's another post entirely). Having now finished it, I'm not sure I understand. It's an interesting concept: at the moment of the first nuclear test in the United States, the three fathers of the atomic bomb--J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard--are transported to 2003, and are whisked off on many adventures, eventually heading off to Washington on a crusade to end nuclear proliferation. I can get behind that part, even though the time-travel element makes me fundamentally nervous. Millet has clearly done her homework, and she's spiked her novel with some truly horrifying facts about America's nuclear history. If she had written nonfiction, she would clearly have done an excellent job. As a novelist, though, I think she got bogged down in trying to be satiric and lyrical, all at the same time, and forgot to tell a compelling story. She starts off well enough, but the characters--with the exception of Fermi, to whom she manages to do some justice--never really become more than sketches and/or stereotypes, and the plot gets kind of vague towards the middle (and never fully recovers). There are some funny parts, but most of the comedy is based on further stereotyping of hippies, and I sort of feel like she could have done better. The verdict: Decent writing of a muddly plot. Certainly not a bad novel, but it could have been better.
My library copy of OPARH (not to be confused with OPRAH) was big and heavy, so on days when I didn't feel like lugging it around, I carried a copy of Margaret Atwood's newest release, The Tent. It's a series of "fictional essays," which are essentially snippets of short stories, bits and pieces of writing that are interesting, but not interconnected in any way. I mostly liked it: if nothing else, Atwood is a good writer, and there's not much else to say about it. She's clever, and she's funny, and she's insightful in a way that's really kind of wonderful. I love what she does with words. On the other hand, I have to admit that I forgot most of the pieces approximately five minutes after I read them. They're hard to read one after another, because it feels bad to not give each piece its due time and thought, but it also feels bad to stop every three pages, which is about the average length of each piece. So they blur together and eventually become a block of pretty text that's all mushed together in my head, never to be remembered again. Also, I wish I could find a publisher to pay me to publish scraps from my writing notebook. Because that's totally what this is. Nice scraps, though.
Now I'm feeling a little bit of literary ennui--I literally have 25 books sitting unread on the living room floor, and I got three more at the library today (Writers on Writing, Comfort Me With Apples, and America's Best Crime Writing 2004), and I still can't decide what's next. I need some off-ui, and maybe a recommendation or two, if anybody has anything I simply must read.