I don't got a single sober vein in my body.
I'm frightened I'm losing patience with books. Not in the abstract or as the culmination of some existential frustration. But in a Life's-Too-Short kinda way. I'm swifter to exasperation, and while I haven't quite allowed myself to quit a particular book for good, there's one from almost a year ago that has been at 20% completion ever since.
Earlier in the summer, in order to attack some of the thicker tomes that had been gathering dust on my shelf, I picked out Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a book I must've been excited to get as I have it in hardcover, which means I must've purchased it around 2005 or so. The Sam's Club sticker means it predates any Barnes & Noble membership as well as the Tisch-era and subsequent law school-era book binges. It had sat there next to Sacred Games and The Kindly Ones and I knew at some point that I would get to it, interested as I had been at the time in the idea of vampires and "present-day" resonances.
Additionally, I was heartened by the speed with which I'd devoured Crime and Punishment and A Brief History of Seven Killings this summer. Similarly hefty books I'd consumed in similarly ravenous fashion. This would be a breeze, right?
But I couldn't. It plodded. The prose was easy to glide over, but the whole time, I kept thinking of all the books I couldn't wait to finish this book to read. Life was too short and I've made sure the bookmark is firmly in place for when (not if) I pick it up again.
The above, but colored differently, afflicts me now, reading Richard Powers's The Echo Maker. The hook fascinated me, and I remember purchasing this with a batch early on in my first semester. I think there was a collection of Tom Bissell essays in the haul. Either way, I'd known Powers to be a fiercely intellectual writer by virtue of the subjects he had tackled, even just the way he'd been blurbed about. And the prose here is a dream, almost every sentence filled with musical cadence. And there is mystery in this particular book. But I'm left cold. It isn't that the characters annoy me, but I think what is happening, in part, is that some of the more exciting books I read this summer have cast a shadow over everything else. I don't know that I can expect to read a book as incredible and mind-blowing as A Brief History of Seven Killings any time soon, but I hope I'm wrong.
I used to believe (and still do) that I can always learn something of the craft from a book. That was a lot of why I read in general and why I read what I read in particular. I wanted to see how authors did a particular trick, how they managed settings and characters and the interaction therein, how they dealt with time periods, the patterns they wove thematic threads into, structure and the architecture of their novels, all of it. And beautiful sentences. Oh, to see the things that could be done with the English language! So that even a book that wouldn't normally excite me on a purely luxury-reading basis was an absolute lesson in craft. The Echo Maker is a fascinating story (and if I'm feeling particularly generous) fascinatingly told. And I already am learning much from it, brainstorming as I read it.
But I'm already looking forward to the next books in the queue.
Could you imagine if I felt this way about the books I've been writing?
The verdict: I'm getting old(er).
Earlier in the summer, in order to attack some of the thicker tomes that had been gathering dust on my shelf, I picked out Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a book I must've been excited to get as I have it in hardcover, which means I must've purchased it around 2005 or so. The Sam's Club sticker means it predates any Barnes & Noble membership as well as the Tisch-era and subsequent law school-era book binges. It had sat there next to Sacred Games and The Kindly Ones and I knew at some point that I would get to it, interested as I had been at the time in the idea of vampires and "present-day" resonances.
Additionally, I was heartened by the speed with which I'd devoured Crime and Punishment and A Brief History of Seven Killings this summer. Similarly hefty books I'd consumed in similarly ravenous fashion. This would be a breeze, right?
But I couldn't. It plodded. The prose was easy to glide over, but the whole time, I kept thinking of all the books I couldn't wait to finish this book to read. Life was too short and I've made sure the bookmark is firmly in place for when (not if) I pick it up again.
The above, but colored differently, afflicts me now, reading Richard Powers's The Echo Maker. The hook fascinated me, and I remember purchasing this with a batch early on in my first semester. I think there was a collection of Tom Bissell essays in the haul. Either way, I'd known Powers to be a fiercely intellectual writer by virtue of the subjects he had tackled, even just the way he'd been blurbed about. And the prose here is a dream, almost every sentence filled with musical cadence. And there is mystery in this particular book. But I'm left cold. It isn't that the characters annoy me, but I think what is happening, in part, is that some of the more exciting books I read this summer have cast a shadow over everything else. I don't know that I can expect to read a book as incredible and mind-blowing as A Brief History of Seven Killings any time soon, but I hope I'm wrong.
I used to believe (and still do) that I can always learn something of the craft from a book. That was a lot of why I read in general and why I read what I read in particular. I wanted to see how authors did a particular trick, how they managed settings and characters and the interaction therein, how they dealt with time periods, the patterns they wove thematic threads into, structure and the architecture of their novels, all of it. And beautiful sentences. Oh, to see the things that could be done with the English language! So that even a book that wouldn't normally excite me on a purely luxury-reading basis was an absolute lesson in craft. The Echo Maker is a fascinating story (and if I'm feeling particularly generous) fascinatingly told. And I already am learning much from it, brainstorming as I read it.
But I'm already looking forward to the next books in the queue.
Could you imagine if I felt this way about the books I've been writing?
The verdict: I'm getting old(er).