Originally was going to be a Thanksgiving day post, but football interceded. Regardless, I thought I’d say to thank you to something very abstract: Books that you binge read.
At various times, I’ve heard tell that I’m a disciplined person. Well, foolin’ u, because I am actually chronically undisciplined — I just like to work on the things I like working on to what should be an embarrassing extent, addiction style. This really flares up into trouble when I get into a book hardcore, to the point that I really can’t do much besides finish the book.
Miller Family Lore: The one time we ever drove to Florida to visit my grandparents rather than flying (subsequent pull quote: “Diane, if we can’t afford to fly, we’re not going.”), we hit shutdown traffic in Jacksonville, for like two hours. At some point, my parents decided to hell with it, got off I-95 and we stopped at an Exxon or whatever to get snacks and sodas and use the restroom. Waiting in line, my mom said something like, I hope we get out of this traffic soon. I looked at her: “We’ve been in traffic?” I’d been reading Carter Beats the Devil in the back of the Suburban. And that’s not even a good book! Here’s the worst part: I never even finished it. I don’t really have that problem (I will finish “Wings of the Dove” someday, for instance, possibly from hell), so either the quality of that book really declined or the quality of my life on that trip really improved.
This particular paean to binge reading is actually brought to you by the latest entry in the Harry Potter Napalm Reading Canon: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. It’s sort of like watching the Kentucky Wildcats play courtside. You have that meta moment in process where your brain is like: They are doing superhuman things, at superhuman speeds, and it’s real. Eugenides shifts perspectives with such ease and fluidity, and slides back and forth along his allotted time in such a way that you know he’s in complete control and has a plan, like he’s just tossing out the appropriate pieces.
If that sort of technical achievement leaves you dead inside, here’s the brief post-game: It’s not like Virgin Suicides. The story follows three Brown grads for a year after their graduation — romantic Madeleine, and her two suitors, the sincere, religious Mitchell and the brilliant, attractive yet unstable scientist Leonard. Some people I tricked into reading it did not much care for the characters, so if you don’t much care for bouts of flightiness or significant eccentricities, you might want to pass. If you’re looking for something that, oddly since it’s set in the early 1980s, captures the idling displacement of the early 2010s college grad, then you should not pass. On the third hand, we all agreed: This book has a great ending.
Anyway, the best book is the book you literally must finish, to the exclusion of all else. Off the top of my head, mine:
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark — Harry Potter for adults crossed with Thackeray.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters — This is the one without the lesbians (although some of the others with lesbians are good too — Affinity is straight up depressing, but also genius in terms of stretching your disbelief so far you begin to believe what’s happening is real).
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand — Twilight for misanthropes! Never wrote the post I had in mind last winter when I finally read it, but that’s pretty much it. Roark/Dominique, eh?
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden — This book is AWFUL. Not sure Golden has ever met a woman before.
The Hunger Games
Anybody want to volunteer some?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Definitely “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler. Could NOT put it down, not even a little bit.
Ha! I moved some books over from my parents’ to my apartment the other night, and one of them was Wings of the Dove, which I started reading on the way to Prague (…in 2009). Inside the front cover is notes from the plane on the way back, from a conversation I was having with CJ, and one of them is: Read the Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Still haven’t, so I’ll bump that back up on the list.
Also forgot And then There Were None, which actually kind of scared the hell out of me, since I read it at night (good move), and all the bad stuff happens once people go to bed. So, wired, of course, and like, “This is stupid. Nobody’s going to murder me.”
A couple days ago, I finally broke down and picked up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in a checkout line at Safeway. The pacing is excellent, but everyone talks in that weird expository mode and addresses each other by first names at the beginning of sentences. “Mikael, [explains situation both characters are perfectly aware of]. [Expresses opinion of situation].” But I’ve read more of it in two days than I have of Infinite Jest in the last two months.
Also, White Fang. That book is totally metal.