Literanea

I have been utterly neglectful of you, blog. For that I offer my apologies and in recompense I have decided that this place will also archive a notebook of reading habits.

Since January, I have polished off a scant two and two halves books. I say scant, but in light of my reading and writing habits since June (which have been abysmal) my habits following the new year have been nothing short of stupendous.

I began with Steve(n) Milhauser's Pulitzer prize-winning 1997 Martin Dressler, a richly imagined if slightly anemic exploration of the American through Milhauser's brand of the fantastic. It was finely wrought, but in calling it anemic, I mean in reference specifically to a cast of shallowly drawn characters, or in the case of its titular hero, a kind of empty, chauvinistic shell (Although perhaps that was the point.)

As I've read just this novel and a smattering of other stories by Milhauser and all seem to fit into a semi-fantastical category which I might be willing to label a kind of Magical Realism Americana shared and created by James Tate or John Crowley.

Milhauser also seemingly felt the need to hammer the theme through your skull, page after page. Not that I'm opposed to open-ness (Think Vonnegut) but he doesn't exactly go for subtlety. The American dream is (chorus!) vapid, empty and endless.

Grade: B-

Next on the docket: Neal Stephenson's 1992 Snow Crash. Apart from some awkward plotting, dialogue and character development, a fantastic, intelligent, engrossing novel about power in the digital age, eerily prescient (For 1992) predictions. Stephenson has a firm grasp on and the ability to bring together a veritable library of subjects; digitization, Sumerian history/mythology, linguistics, computer science, economics, politics, etc.

Barring its few amateurish missteps (including a protagonist cheekily named Hiro Protagonist, who seems written intentionally as THE MOST BADASS GUY IN THE WORLD00 Indeed he even refers to himself as something similar at one point), it was such a compelling read I immediately went out and purchased the first book in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Grade: A-

Working on now: Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, which, like Snow Crash, suffers from a cloyingly too-perfect protagonist, as well as a near insufferable need to write damsels-in-distress and no other kind of female... might be the best book I've read yet. It even manages to pull off a framework of stories within stories within without giving me a headache, as Christopher Nolan did.

In a kind of high fantasy university level Harry Potter with inklings of god knows what else, Rothfuss has (after about 400 of 700ish pages) created a world I will be sad to leave at this novel's completion. Luckily, it's part of a trilogy.

Working Grade: A-

And 2010's Man-Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The most frustrating and hopefully most rewarding book on this list. This historical novel recasts the world of the early years of Henry VII as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell (Who, since watching "The Tudors" I can only envision as being played by James Frain.)

Despite choppy phrasing and the occasional murky passage, Mantel displays moments of real beauty and displays prowess with her meticulous research. Further, she does not hold the reader's hand as she leads them through 1530s England, but rather expects them to keep apace with cultural and historical references. (ie, if you're a history snob you'll probably enjoy it.)

Working Grade: Too early to say.