Half Years and Such

I'm behind again, aren't I. Three books. Honestly, it is not intentional - there has been so much to do over the past couple of weeks that I've not really had time to reflect on my reading experiences with you. But I can assure you that the adventures I've been having, the pages I've read, have left me thoroughly impressed. I'll do my best this week to get you caught up.

This post is not about anything of that nature though. Instead, it is a celebration of a year of reading - or rather, six months of reading. I've counted, and have had the pleasure of reading 19 books thus far. Not an overly impressive number, but seeing as one book (Atlas Shrugged) took me nearly two months to get through rather than my standard 4 or 5 days, I'll take what I can get.

This gives me a great opportunity to look back at what I've read, and the places I've been. And the places I've been.

I've crossed into Japan and back with a man named Jacob de Zoet, traveled to the Ukraine and altered the lives and deaths of entire towns, witnessed the split of Czechoslovakia in the midst of a political art crisis, traveled to the backwoods of Canadian Identity in lakes of Quebec, discovered a post-Civil War Southern United States where lawlessness is terrifying, traveled to St. John's from Labrador with a transgendered almost woman almost named Annabel, perused Norway's backwoods where the war still haunts the memories of man and woman, and built a railway with a female tycoon only to have it taken away and be transported to a utopia while the world falls to pieces.

I've done well for myself, considering I've not actually left my town since New Years, no?

So where do I stand so far? What are my favourite reads?

I'm going to keep the number to six, just under a third of what I've read. A challenge, because, as you'd know if you've been following me all year, I don't really think I've read anything particularly bad this year. Here goes nothing...

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - I'm sure this surprises nobody. After finishing this novel, I was in a reading funk; I could not convince myself that the books I was picking up to try and fill the void were doing it. The language and characters that fill the pages are truly special, and I look forward to reading it again.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - This is a haunting tale, and I'm sure that an academic could place it in a historical genre of magical realism if they were so inclined. I would listen, as I am sure that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is also rightfully placed in it (and it also, is rightfully placed among the classics). What impressed me most was Dorian Gray's character, and how Oscar Wilde took hold of a theme and illustrated with a painting. Terrifying.

Regeneration by Pat Barker - Part One of a trilogy, I was impressed with this novel's subtlety. You'll find out more about it later this week (I promise), but the characters and their attachments to each other thoroughly impressed me, and the delicacy with which Barker captured the flashbacks horrified. The second novel is waiting for me to pick up from the local library. Truly, this trilogy should be exalted into the highest echelons of anti-war literature.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - If you knew me, you'd be shocked by this selection. My entire family scoffed at me for reading it, and then slowly came out of their respective closets: my mother read it in University, my Grandma read it while she was pregnant with my aunt. This highly controversial novel, though not perfectly written, is phenomenally constructed. While not a masterpiece in literature, it is a masterpiece in the mixture of ideology and plot and character. I battled with Rand throughout the story, because it challenged so many of my ideals - and still does. A powerful and demanding read expertly constructed.

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel - Yann Martel wrote about Pears and Bananas and stole my heart. This story, this allegory, this symbolic portrayal of the destruction of an entire race of people - it proved to me that Martel can make me react to animals with more empathy than almost any other author can with human characters. Not only is the ending heartbreaking and confusing, but it asks for you to become involved. A short, disconcerting read.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy - Mr. McCarthy has something to say about the human condition, and he does by no means sing its praises. It does not trust, it does not see beauty. It destroys, and turns the world to darkness. There is no respite. And McCarthy's incredible painting of a landscape, both detailed and mysterious, and his populating of the world with people, both detailed and mysterious, astounds - he writes as though he has seen this, and though the world he portrays is the world he recognizes. And by the end of every novel he writes you are only more convinced. The characters and the plot of this story, neither elaborated beyond the bare necessity, feel like an exploration of the unknown, and the discovery of monsters turns this two-hundred page novella into an epic. Stunning.

Honourable Mention: The best parts of my judgement are telling me that I can't include The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell on this list. I just finished it tonight, but it impressed me immensely. I look forward to reflecting on it over the next week.

A Dark and Divided World

So I have finished Cormac McCarthy's novel Outer Dark. In the final day of its reading, Sunday, I unintentionally read 170 pages - I had intended on letting it last for another couple days. But the story picked up, and the suspense of the novel kept me turning pages, and the flow of the language made me completely unaware of how far I had gotten into the book.

This is the third of McCarthy's commentaries on human nature that I have read, and it may actually be the most dark. Not quite as depressing as The Road, and not quite as violent as No Country for Old Men, but I think it is far more mysterious. It starts with a brother and sister, who have a child together. The child, on the eve of its birth, is put outside by the brother out of shame for what he has done with his sister. Once there, the child is collected by a tinker (or tradesman), and taken to a nursing mother so that it may survive.

Once discovering this, the mother sets out to find the child. The brother of the mother and father of the child sets out the find her. As their adventure takes them through a long-lost world of American Appalachian wilderness, deliriously careening down mysterious roads, sleeping in forests, and relying on the kindness of strangers for water and food and work and accommodation, they leave behind them a wake of destruction. Lives are destroyed or lost, and there is fear in the air.

Nobody trusts anybody in this story, and yet everybody is friendly enough to ensure that others survive. Until the one group of people who isn't arrives at your doorstep and ensures that you don't.

This novel is filled with tense moments, written in action-focused prose acted by characters that seem simple but are undeniably complex. They are products of a time completely unfamiliar to our own, and yet in whom you recognize aspects of yourself. I was amazed, and frightened, at how frequently I would read dialogue between strangers and think that I have had those conversations before - and enjoyed them about as much as the characters appeared to be.

I don't know if I agree with McCarthy's stark and concerning portrayal of the world, but I have to admit that I come from a part of the world where I have not been affected by enough of the violence and hate that animates his universes to be able to relate. I am certain that there are places and people that can far better. I hear about it in the news - I know it exists. And, part of the intention of those novels I have read (particularly Outer Dark and No Country For Old Men) is the outline the randomness of violence, and how it can affect those who suspect it just as rapidly as it can alter the lives of those who don't.

The way that McCarthy writes about violence is shocking. It isn't graphic. He invites mystery into his novels and tells your imagination to fill in the blank. I last wrote about this novel marking the massive difference between his voice and that of Kathleen Winter, and I believe this to be the primary result: Winter paints the picture for you to see, McCarthy provides the underlying sketch and then asks your imagination to add the colour. Going from a rather poetic voice to this one requires an effort of mind at first.

I would recommend this novel, if you are a fan of suspense. It is a period piece, and it is alarming, and it tells something about human relationship (I would love to consider the relationship between Culla and Rinthy Holme, the mother and father of the lost child), and tells something of human suffering in an imperfect world, and tells something of human attraction to committing acts of violence. It asks the question of innocence, and points out that nobody is - and yet, it seems that it also notes that nobody is deserving of violence. This is a story about suffering, not redemption or justice; of mystery made from the natural and myth from the normal.

I exalt Mr. McCarthy to the halls of my most preferred authors, and look forward to reading more of his writing so that he may be confirmed in this place once more and once more and once more.

Finished. Again. Annabel.

I'm finished Annabel. It is too early to say that I have been changed by it, but I think it is not too early to say that I have been challenged by it. Many of its themes were so closely tied to things that I have been thinking about for the past several weeks that the last couple hundred pages just wrapped me in words and gently set me down on a bed of Caribou Moss.

I will write about it soon. This is a book that deserves a good amount of reading. Though I am going to have to read the epilogue again between now and then. I am not sure that I liked it much...

I started reading a new book this evening. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy - one of the books I purchased today even though I have plenty of other books to read. It is his second published novel, dating back to 1968, and the voice of the author is so drastically different than that of Kathleen Winter in Annabel that I have found myself racing through the text without comprehending it.

Clearly I had forgotten that you cannot do this with a Cormac McCarthy book.

I have had to go back and read paragraphs and pages, and remind myself to slow down in my reading. It isn't a race, Neal - it is a measure of comprehension and impact. That is why I read. Not to see my 'finished' bookshelves expand, but to be moved.

I had the same problem when I started reading Annabel, whose voice is different still from that of Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil (have you started this book yet, by the way - it is beyond fantastic). It is difficult to switch between author's in the same day - this is my fourth in less than two weeks. Fifth and sixth if you include War and Peace and An Irish Heart. I need to slow down my reading, apparently.

On a side note, if this novel is as enjoyable as both The Road and No Country For Old Men were I will be prepared to exalt McCarthy to an internal list of some of the greatest writers I know of. I suppose I will keep you informed as to how this goes. I don't expect this novel to last more than the weekend - and then I don't know what to pick up afterwards. Faulkner? Atwood?

Isn't this why I am reading War and Peace too?