Contrasting Autobiographies

So in-line with deciding to run the half marathon in July, and my tendency to read a Murakami for every second book, i started reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. This is essentially a few autobiographical stories and thoughts of Murakami, set amidst his training for the New York Marathon one year. It's nice to read a bit more about his history, although there tend to be a lot of "I'm the kinda guy" sentences which I don't like... and all of the distances are in miles, i wonder whether this is due to the americanness of the translation.

At the same time my dad gave me my uncle Colin's autobiography. Uncle Colin would love to be able to do a little of what Murakami does, he would love to be able to walk down the street, but he has been confined to a wheelchair since the age of 3. His outgoing nature and love of music has allowed him to live quite a full life, socially with a club he began in his early adulthood and throughout his life as an entertainer. Like anyone who learns to get on with it and love life in the face of a limitation, Col's most difficult moments are when he has to confront his disability head on. Whenever anything happens because of his disability - a girl's parents won't support their relationship, a wife decides it's getting to be a bit too much, his boss decides he's just a bit too slow at getting around - these moments are the hardest to deal with, because the last thing he's ever wanted to do is blame his circumstances for his happiness. When someone tells you it's specifically because he is in a wheelchair that they won't be with him, how could he do anything but blame the chair for this disappointment? Colin is also a bit of an "I'm the kinda guy" type of person, but I guess this is the essential question when someone reads an autobiography.

2011 China Books

So after I accepted that I would give up on Flatterland, I did manage to start (and finish) Great expectations over the course of 2011. Wonderfully playful and interesting throughout, but long I guess. I was surprised how much I remembered of the Ethan Hawke film but looking back at a trailer it seems like the story is pretty different. Again, unrequited love is sometimes over-romanticised, but here it is at least is not held as something transcendentally pure - rather we just think Pip is a bit young and foolish. Glad to have finally read this - it's been on the shelf for a while.

Then back into the Murakami short stories The elephant vanishes. Some of these stories were extended to his longer stories, others seem like short exercises. I guess one that, although simplistic, really stands out for me was a little love story about passers-by. We could walk past the perfect person for us every day, but of course as we get older it becomes much less of a good idea to hassle people in the street and tell them this. Fortunately, people have RSVP which is sort of the same but doesn't involve as much of the uncertainty that hassling people on the street would.

Because I finished it earlier than expected while traveling in China, I also read The Scarlett Letter - entirely on my iPhone. It did seem like a bit of undesirable thing to read a book in this way, but it wasn't available in the library after I cam home either. I certainly would rather a book for recreational reading. The Scarlett Letter has become such an icon in our society - even Tool's the grudge has a reference to it, but I had no idea what the intention of the book had been. The story seems a perfect illustration of Sartrean bad faith - on the one hand you have an adultress who, by proudly wearing her confession, is able to accept herself and become quite a beautiful character, while on the other you have the community, forcing her to wear the confession and disfiguring their moral beings Dostoyevsky-like in the process. Despite the Christian overtones of the book, Christian morality doesn't really play much of a part here, since there are so many symbols and dreamscapes in the book the society and religion that governs it may as well be fictional.

a year and a bit of books...

So... seems like I gave up a while ago... i hadn't realised. Well, I guess August 2010 I was just finishing up the writing of my PhD so there probably wasn't much time to keep count.

I did end up reading Everything Ravaged, Everything burned - which was pretty nice. Estelle Tang had a nice review of this. I recall being a little unsettled with the graphic descriptions in the final story - in particular a creative viking ritual called a "bloody angel". Like watching a Chan-wook park film - you sort of wonder what it adds to your life to be exposed to macabre art. I guess at some level it stops you from making your way passively through life without having to experience emotion, which is sort of good. There were a whole lot of pretty human characters in these stories, I remember hearing Tower say that he liked to bring the reader's character sympathies to an alternative point as the stories progress... I'm not sure whether this worked or not. The characters were human, but because they weren't my kind of human, I found it hard to genuinely sympathise.

I also made attempts to read flatterland, but i found it got a bit dull and I couldn't be bothered with the teenage girl-square protagonist (or is she a pentagon?). On the other hand, I found reading flatland earlier in the year delightful. It is a metaphor for relativity, in particular of how we perceive the forces of 4 dimensions in 3.

Moby Dick

After a few chapters my suspicion was that Moby Dick would be one of those turn of the century novels which would be justified by a few beautiful paragraphs. At least, at the rate I read and general difficulty when it comes to concentrating, I tend to get a bit lost in books like Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby - books from this time period where the short novel was emerging from realist fiction. So after the first few chapters, I figured Moby Dick was going to do this to me, and in particular I was waiting for a line referred to by Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: First Contact, "If his chest had been a cannon" or something like that.

The line never came. I think it's misquoted and actually should be "if his chest had been a mortar," and either way, I missed the sentiment. I did find the writing all very good, but the ideas of nobility in whaling were lost on me a bit, even trying to appreciate the whole 'different times' thing.

So, yes. Good, and some nice sentiments somewhere in it - and the depictions of a hostile ocean are quite full-on for a shark-fearing man like myself, but I think maybe this book didn't change my life. Oh well.

not a literary critic

I made it through the slap - and i decided that from now on, I will not pretend that I have decent opinions on literature and retreat into books that i like.

my problem with the slap is, as i remarked for dfw, that by articulating inner thoughts of people that occur on the periphery (if at all), it privileges them to the point that they seem like the central driving force of each character. E.g., I might walk past a billboard of a sports-woman, and for whatever reason, will imagine her losing her leg below the knee, then perhaps in order for that to happen i will imagine sawing it off with a hack-saw. It's not something i set out to think about, it's not a thought that i entertain for any amount of time, in fact, i will usually move on without thinking that i have thought it, but somewhere in that brain of mine it was there. It's not that i actually want to torture someone, or become a surgeon or anything, though. So - with The Slap, is it really capturing the essence of a character if he sees a girl and then just thinks of aggressively f*ing her? Is it naive of me to think that, in general, most people are reasonably well-intentioned?

Secondly, sometimes the dialogue between characters is just awful. I'll admit that sometimes it's realistic enough, but sometimes I sort of feel insulted that I have to read a passage and buy it.

I'm happy for others to call this good. It's just not something that I get much out of, and in the future I will not be duped into such exploits. I will, instead, read Kurt Vonnegut's posthumous release which has some nice sentimental goings on... but sentiments that I like and am happy to read about.

Tom tom cho

Stuck in the middle of unenthralling "The Slap", I reached up to the pile of books above my head and started reading Tom Cho's short stories. Man, so funny! Some of the stories draw upon his life as an Asian Australian: sweet and sour pork recipes passed down from generation to generation, an aunt who likes to point out how similar "this house is mine" and "do i smell burning" look in cantonese -and other bits from his life as a geek: dungeons and dragons, 80s movies. I read this within a couple of days, often sitting up in bed by myself and giggling.. if not sitting in a crowded university cafeteria doing the same thing.

The brilliance of Tom Cho, I think, is not just that he's funny - but that some of his derivatives quite complex and intelligent. The majority of these stories touch on a real emotion, a real problem or dilemma, and only use comedy to belie the absurdity inherent in life, or as something to ease the tension. I wonder how he goes about writing these stories - does he base the story around the serious bit? or does he insert serious bits into a comedy sketch? or is this all just Tom Cho winging it? Given that he has just finished his PhD, I must assume that he really thinks out these pieces and it pays off.

Having finished Look Who's Morphing, i had to return to the Slap. I have never been so tempted not to bother finishing a book... it is a hard slog. I'm not saying it's not good. I can understand that some of it demonstrates acute observations into Australian middle-class culture - but some of it just seems too contrived and yet too shallow. He produces characters who live, breathe, speak like someone you know well - and yet this character is empty and it doesn't quite make sense... as if he has noticed how a person acts but doesn't understanding why they act that way - drawing instead on an amalgamated understanding. Is it really the case that everyone cheats on their wives so determinedly? Is a woman who breastfeeds her child for a long time really the sort of person who will be so vindictive when it comes to a cousin of her friend? Is it necessary to begin each sexual encounter with "she cupped his balls" - frankly I much prefer to hear about Tom Cho "having the hottest sex you can imagine".

So there you go, who'd have thought one could compare these books in a meaningful fashion? Looks like I found a way!

I wish I were a better physicist/mathematician/astronomer/genius

I enjoy pop-science... perhaps because I am only a mediocre scientist. Bryson's book was recommended to me by a student, and I mainly enjoyed it so much because of all the talk of giant and tiny things. He has a nice way of using absurd measurements "enough marbles to fill the superbowl" or the number of years it takes to reach pluto travelling at a reasonable speed.

As with most science books like this, I am unable to recall most of the facts, but Bryson's stuff seems well researched and is obviously very accessible.

I will not go on and on and on and on. Except to say that it's these sorts of books that make me wonder what on earth it all means...