1. Starters
Books have been the staple of my intellectual diet since fifth grade. In 1961, I remember getting a library card. The first books I took out were history and biography: one dealing with the Battle of Tippecanoe and the other about its commanding general and the future (shortest term) President of the U.S. 

Earlier, in 1961, the centennial of the start of the Civil War was being observed very vigorously, especially in schools. The effect on my fourth grade class, in particular, was so strong that many of us, during recess, divided into Union and Confederate sides and wore the respective headgear. No swords or weapons, some physical aggression typical of boys in the schoolyard, that is, plenty of running and chasing. Around this time, my uncle, Trevor N. Dupuy, a professor at West Point, a Colonel in Burma during World War II, published two books: Civil War Land Battles and Civil War Naval Actions. In 1962, I was given both books, which started my interest in History, especially the Civil War.
 
More, I became my uncle's most fervid reader and in the next four years read his 18 volume History of World War II. In the blibliography I list the books, which were short and had an abundance of photos. Then in 1967, he published a twelve volume history of World War I. It wasn't long before I moved on from the Civil War and WWII and made World War I my favorite war. I read as many books as I could find, especially from the library, but one stands out: The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne. One of the bloodiest battles in History, six months long, with little ground gained by the attacking German forses, over a million men killed. It got to the heart of my fascination with the Great War, especially the Western Front. The trench warfare, the battleline moving very little from October 1914 to July 1918. Although the other fronts of the war proved engaging if not quite odd or eccentric. The British fought the Germans in Tanganika and during a British attack on that colony, most of the casualties came from bee stings. And the fighting on the continent lasted until June 1919, with the British troops, under General Smuts, pursuing the remnant of German forces, out of communication with the world, into central Africa. There was also the fighting against the Turks on Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. The latter interest was stoked by the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and I may have read about T.E. Lawrence but would not get through The Seven Pillars of Wisdom until the 1980s. 

In 1965, I read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which had ignited my interest in WW I, which I followed up with her The Zimmermann Telegram,  but waited a decade before I bought The Proud Tower. The events leading to the war bad become mmore interesting than the campaigns, fronts, and battles. And it wouldn't be long before I became critical of the monarchies, whom I believed to be most responsible for starting the war, and the strategies of the military leaders: Haig: the Battle of the Somme; Joffre and von Falkenhayn: Verdun; Ludendorf, a successful commander, leading to the victory over Russia and fains on the Western Front in 1918, but after the war became attached to the Nazi party and perpetuated the "stab in the back" rationale for Germany's defeat in the First World War.

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Biting Off More Than I Can Read

 

1.

 

Maybe an essay dealing with more than any would want to read best defines what I want to do:

1. I considered a blog about books,

2. ensconced in a computer network whose users are indifferent to books,

3. where books have become increasingly irrelevant

4. by a writer who is unknown to the world of blog readers and the reading public;

5. a writer who senses no one cares about his tastes, fancies, insights, humor,

6. but who can't who can't stop himself.

                                                                              * 

Am I making a case for no one to read this anywhere?

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But if someone is reading it, he or she must either care a bit or are curious. Perhaps I’ll blindly wander into a world of book readers who can share and appreciate my obsessive reading experiences.

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How to define this obsession? That’s one of the threads of this venture, examining the symptoms of a drive or appetite to read as many books as I can, starting around age ten. Could I have been naïve enough to have thought I could read everything? Did I know or anticipate the enormous amount of literature out there? I was satisfied, if not confident, that my tastes were wide enough to include many genres in fiction and large quantity of nonfiction, especially historical books.

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A character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, Ogier P., an autodidact, is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically. The project seems both admirable and pathetic. No, I don’t think I could be so systematic, as my reading habits will prove, but the scale of my reading mirrors Ogier’s project.

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*

Evidence of my progressive desire to read everything is the increasing number of books that I own and have not read (or only partially read). This inclination started early, in my teens, as I found great pleasure buying books. I belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild during my sophomore year in high school. In my thirties, as I started a career as a History teacher, I joined the History Book Club. These started my book surplus, as initial enthusiasms for many works (the Eastern Roman Empire, the Goths, archaeology) often died before I even started the books dealing with these topics. Because I found other books more interesting and promised myself I would eventually get to the increasing number of dust-gathering hardbacks.

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The book overpopulation took off exponentially once I accessed second-hand book stores.

 

                                                                          *

Starting in college, most of the books I bought cost a fraction of the retail price. Forty-years of second hand books subsequently made worse with the creation of Amazon. I had access virtually to any book ever written. And, like regular searches for books in New York City and Philadelphia, I reveled in tracking down many remote books.

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But the ultimate testament to my obsession is the presence in my bookcases of several thousand-page books or books that are almost or feel like a thousand pages. All these books have been started but, due to age and distractions, I gave up after reading, at most, ten to fifteen percent of each.

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Not that I don’t have a successful history of reading very long books. In high school, at age fifteen, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It took two weeks, reading eighty to ninety pages a day. Then there was Irving Wallace’s The Plot. I remember a blurb on the nine hundred-page paperback: “Only a shortage of paper will prevent this book from being a bestseller.” In my thirties, I read the nearly thousand pages of Don Quixote.

Trouble began with the eight hundred-page Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I had read V. and The Crying of Lot 49. And I motored through the early pages of his magnum opus. But around page four hundred I bogged down, I told myself I would get back to it. I did but didn’t get much further. But this didn’t prevent me from buying Mason & Dixon. Nearly eight hundred pages. I haven’t even started it after fifteen years.

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The latter book reminded me of two John Barth novels I couldn’t finish: The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy (neither could I get very far in his very long Letters). The first Barth book anticipated Mason & Dixon; the second intrigued me for its alleged satire of campus life at Penn State University, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, the same department where Barth worked a few years prior to my matriculation.

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Mason & Dixon’s pales beside the impossibly long narratives (and supremely small print) of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Women and Men by Joseph McElroy.

 

2.

 

I explained to a friend what I considered were the qualities of the greatest authors.

The author makes you want to give up writing.

There are a million better writers than me. Some of these writers I could give some fair competition to. But among the million are many who would make these good and great writers pause and consider a new vocation. My two earliest encounters of the most intimidating fiction came from Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov. Their writing is to everyone’s else’s what Plato’s philosophy is to the rest of philosophical endeavor.

To add David Foster Wallace to a category including Proust and Nabokov is apt given my Plato analogy. Philosophy since the fourth century B.C.E. has been called a footnote to Plato. A distinctive feature of Wallace’s work is the footnote (or endnote). Infinite Jest has 388 endnotes covering 96 pages. I first encountered footnotes in a work of literature reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. They elucidate some elements of the poem but, in toto, they could be considered an elaborate joke. Look at this erudition, Eliot seems to say, but you won’t find the meaning of the poem here. The next time I saw footnotes, in Samuel Beckett’s Watt, clearly were satirizing Eliot’s use of them. The bulk of Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a commentary to a 999-line poem. Indeed, Wallace’s footnotes in any of his works have Watt and Pale Fire as literary ancestors.

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I read approximately 80 pages of Infinite Jest but circumstances forestalled any chance for sustained reading. So dense a novel needs long sustained readings, especially at the start, maybe 60 to a 100 pages. Take big chunks out of the book, as I had for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. However, I could barely read ten pages an hour and had little time available when I was teaching. Nothing kills a difficult reading venture than staying away from the book for two or three days. When I retired from teaching and had infinite time, I couldn’t make a commitment of a month or more to it. Nor did I want to reread the first 80 pages, although I had forgotten most of the content.

Not finishing Infinite Jest should have prevented me from buying his first novel, The Broom of the System. I started it but gave up quickly. It wasn’t as interesting as the former book, and I genuinely desire to finish it someday. But I rarely read books over three hundred pages and recently have completed a slew under one hundred pages. I like filling up my list of books read for the year. My fiercest reading binge occurred during the Summer of 1967 when I had read Shirer’s book. Fifty-three books. Since high school, I doubt that I have read fifty in one year.

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Perhaps because I couldn’t finish Infinite Jest, I read as much of his other works as I could. His story collections:
The Girl with Curious Hair

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

And essay collections:

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Consider the Lobster

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This is Water

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Is a commencement speech, exactly the opposite of the kind I got from Joe Paterno at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium in 1973. Joe was chosen because he had turned down an offer to leave Penn State and coach the New York Jets or New England Patriots. Here was an example of a man of principles. Now it appears that he should have taken the pro football coaching job and get as far away from his assistant coach, Sandusky, as he could.

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The heart of David Foster Wallace’s speech comes from two successive passages:

1. “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

2. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

The speech is paean to a liberal arts education.

His two books of essays inform the reader superlatively about the sport of tennis, the American political campaign, sea cruises, talk-radio, state fairs, and literature. The title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again has made the greatest practical impact. I had been reluctant to take ocean liner cruise for years. Now, Wallace cemented the everyday horror of the experience. Primarily, one is with too many other people. Eating and recreating with them, perhaps a small group, but amid thousands of others. It seemed the ships on the Celebrity and Disney Cruises are too big, as if you wouldn’t recognize you’re on a boat (and you only would when circumstances went horribly wrong). The first section of the essay includes the cultural vulgarity once shouldn’t have to pay to be around: a 13-year old with a toupee; fluorescent luggage, sunglasses, and pince nez; a woman in silver lame projectile vomit inside a glass elevator; and elevator reggae music.

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Wallace’s style may be the most intense I’ve encountered. Proust can tie you into a mental bow with a two-page sentence; Nabokov pins you to the ground with his impeccable style and mastery of language. Yet, the scope of Wallace’s imaginatively innovative universe is daunting. Can any human being take in as much as he did? Critic David Lipsky said that Wallace’s “was the one voice I absolutely trusted to make sense of the outside world to me.” Another quality of the greatest writers.

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Eventually, I want to return to Infinite Jest. Put aside the hundreds of books I own and haven’t read and spend two or three months with it. (I plan the same for two Nabokov novels: Ada and The Gift.) And eventually I will feel compelled to obtain Wallace’s incomplete third novel, The Pale King. It’s only 500 pages, although it appears the book, if finished, could have been 1500 pages. Then, again, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to collect a dozen or so books from the greatest of the great authors and strictly read, and reread, only them for the rest of my life.

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3.

Joseph McElroy is not well known among general readers. His Wikipedia entry calls him “a difficult writer”. There are many difficult writers but the entry is an understatement. His fiction is often impenetrable, by which I mean that you can’t get very far very quickly, and it’s difficult to comprehend and remember. His one book, Plus, took four efforts before I finished it. It was worth reading. A friend, who also read it, said that reading it was the equivalent of raising a retarded child. Extremely difficult. Demanding patience and fortitude. As for his other novels, I first bought Lookout Cartridge and got nowhere fast. It became my whipping post for unreadable novels. Then I found an inexpensive hardback copy of the 1192-page Women and Men. I read twenty, maybe thirty pages. Like Infinite Jest, the idea of devoting so much time to one book dampened my interest. Always hopeful, I found on Amazon Ancient History and A Smuggler’s Bible. They seemed approachable and of reasonable length (less than 400 pages). It didn’t matter. I couldn’t read them.

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For a while I have toyed with the idea of the connection between a writer’s style and our reception to his or her writing. While it is difficult to pin down a style in so many words, we can approach it in a general way:

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1. Schopenhauer wrote the aphorism: “Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is a more reliable key to character than the physiognomy of the body.” Transfer the mind to an author’s writing, then consider the content of the writing as ‘the body’.

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2. What is physiognomy? Judging a person’s character via the facial features.

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3. A writer’s work gives us the features of a mind. Just as we may not like a person’s features (extreme example for me: Ted Cruz), a writer’s style may put us off.

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4. My example of a writer I have less enthusiasm for than other writers whose entire work (save the obvious one) I’ve read is James Joyce. I didn’t get anywhere with Finnegan’s Wake, but style is the least of my problems with it. I have read and moderately enjoyed Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. But rarely have I studied Joyce closely. And I have been encouraged by professors and friends who are Joyce scholars to take a closer look. There’s a payoff. Michael Begnal, a Joyce scholar and my my professor for three English courses at Penn State, Advised me to read Finnegan’s Wake and not worry about understanding it immediately, then handed me Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. I barely made it to the third page of the novel, and the Skeleton Key just got rusty.

 

5. I have greater enthusiasm for one of Joyce’s proteges: Samuel Beckett, having read all of Beckett’s books four times over. Even the most demanding, How It Is and The Unnamable still interest me. And these are books with virtually no breaks. How It Is is one sentence! A book similar to this, Conducting Bodies by Claude Simon, is one of my favorites. Thus, the outright difficulty reading the text does not constitute the ultimate reason for pushing away an author’s work.

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6. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his short autobiography, The Words, that we only read what agrees with our viewpoint. Think about it. It would take a great effort to read works that contradicted our view of the world. Equally difficult would be to navigate a writer whose style alienates us.

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7. I can’t watch the films of Paul Mazurski. A sampling: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; Alex in Wonderland; Blume in Love; Harry and Tonto; and Down and Out in Beverly Hills. A decent sampling. A few of these movies are well regarded. I couldn’t get very far into them. I didn’t think they were awful or lacked artistry, although Blume in Love was hard to digest.

8. The same could be true for actors. I have heard people declaim the deficiencies of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Dreyfus, etc. I cannot watch Tom Cruise or Barbra Streisand, and I try to avoid Meryl Streep and Robin Williams. I can’t give you a solid reason. They bug me. Maybe none more so than David Niven. I make no apologies.

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                                                                             *

Thus, for my failed efforts to take on the oeuvre of Joseph McElroy, I don’t blame McElroy. It wasn’t meant to be. And I am pretty sure I won’t buy any more of his books. However, he has a short work, Night Soul and other stories. Can I be tempted to take a look? Give him one last try? Forget all the other books of his I couldn’t read?

 

4.

 

Between September, 1983, and October, 1987, I purchased 21 books through Rare and Out-of-Print Book agencies.  The books cost between $35 and $80.  The process allowed me to send the agencies on a hunt for the book, then they mailed me a price quotation once the book was found, and I chose whether to buy it or not.  It appears cumbersome today compared to the near instantaneous quotations one can get from Amazon.com, Abe Books, and Alibris.  I stopped purchasing books this way ten years before I bought a computer, partly for lack of money, not that I had very much when I was buying them. 

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I recently found an inventory of the books in an old personal journal. These were books I had seriously wanted and had sought them after having exhausted my closest resources: several bookstores in New York City and Philadelphia and many bookstores on or near several college campuses I visited.

My first purchase was Reasons of the Heart by Edward Dahlberg. Dahlberg interested me, among other reasons, because I collected books of aphorisms: E.M. Cioren, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Nicolas Chamfort, etc.  My passion for this form of writing had previously led me to try to complete an MFA at Columbia by writing a book of aphorisms.  The project never got beyond one class where we discussed fifty or sixty of them (I had written five hundred), but the teacher, Frank MacShane, received them coldly, despite his having written on Dahlberg’s aphorisms.  

As described in Jonathan Lethem’s Harper’s article in 2003, Dahlberg adopted a severe persona inside and outside of his books.  His writing style is one of the most demanding in American letters.  No less intensely does he judge the work of his contemporaries and classics. For instance, Henry James was plainly unreadable (I read this at the time I was trying to get through The Ambassadors and couldn’t have agreed with Dahlberg more).  Apparently, Dahlberg damned student writing in classes at Columbia University just as severely, advising the fragile egos in writing classes to give up trying to write.  His aphorisms continue the assault on those who expect life to relax for a moment and allow the horse’s ass to pass by.

A writer whose path crossed mine in one such writing class at Columbia was William Bronk, a friend of my teacher, Richard Elman. Bronk read passages from The New World, a book rhapsodizing Mayan and Incan civilizations (a topic Dahlberg touches in The Gold of Ophir).  I was so impressed that ten years later I ordered The World, The Worldless by Bronk, a book of poetry through a Rare Book agency.  I seldom bought books of poetry, but these poems lived up to my anticipation.  Several years later I joined a group which met weekly where one of us brought a poem into to discuss for thirty to forty-five minutes.  I chose Bronk’s “A Postcard To Send To Sumer”:

       Something you said--I found it written down--
      and your picture yesterday, brought back old times.
      We are here in another country now.  It’s hard.
      (When was it ever different?) The language is odd;
      we have to grope for words for what we mean.
      And we hardly ever really feel at home
      as though we might be happier somewhere else.
      Companion, brother, (this funny) I look
      for you among the faces as if I might find
      you here, or find you somewhere, and problems would then
      be solved. What problems are ever solved?
      Brother, the stars are almost the same
      and in good weathers--here it is summer now--
      when the airs are kind, it seems the world and we
      might last unchanged forever. Brother, I think
      you would like it here in spite of everything.
      I don’t know where to send this to you. Perhaps
      I’ll be able to find it before the mails have closed.

I was impressed by the poem’s melancholy stemming from the sense of fatal brotherhood with a past civilization and, simultaneously, our mutually expecting to never find final comfort with what we have become.  It is why we read, breathe, and write. 

 

* 
 

As for an inventory, I purchased six works of fiction:

The Blue Flowers -- Raymond Queneau       Mahu, or the Material -- Robert Pinget
The Axe -- Ludvik Vaculik                               To the End of the World -- Blaise Cendrars
Sutter’s Gold -- Blaise Cendrars                      Brave African Huntress -- Amos Tutuola 

These books were written by authors I had read intensively the previous decade, most of them first encountered in several Comparative Literature classes taught by Paul West at Penn State. I had wanted to read all of their novels, especially Pinget’s, whose nuances and narrative devices I had tried often in my own work. The title of my first novel was taken from Mahu’s first line: “This is a story I can’t make head nor tail of it....”  Overall, Queneau may have influenced me more greatly.  I have described my novel, Berthcut & Sons (formerly known as Head Nor Tail, in queries to editors) as being “Ameriqueneau.”  

The other thirteen books comprised various works of nonfiction – philosophy, history, memoir – from influential authors.  A Cendrars memoir of World War I, Lice, complemented another work about French soldiers in the trenches, Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory.  T. Harry Williams’ P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray I acquired because of an interest Southern Civil War Generals, especially Beauregard, who participated in many battles and campaigns: Fort Sumter, First Mannasas, Shiloh and the southern retreat into Mississippi, and the defense against Sherman’s drive through South Carolina at the end of the war.  After reading it I was more amazed by the organized chaos of battles in the Civil War (and probably all wars), especially the apparently arbitrary factors which allowed one side to carry the day (Battles of Bull Run and Shiloh) and how generals could make or break battles with decisions made in an instant with little or scattered bits of information with which to work.

Invertebrate Spain and Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset added to my already large collection of the Spanish philosopher’s books, as Ortega was and remains the single strongest influence on my ideas and direction in life.  My aforesaid novel began with an epigraph from Ortega: “The edge of a coin is all that separates the novel from pure comedy.” Invertebrate Spain proved to be a necessary prelude to his most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses.

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The remaining purchases:

 

The Outlook for Intelligence – Paul Valery           

The Greek Tyrants – A. Andrews          

Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin – Otto Jespersen 

Terrorism – Walter Lacqueur             

The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes – Arthur Waley

War and Human Progress – John Nef                               

History of Rome – Thomas Mommsen

Idols of the Tribe – Harold R. Isaacs                             

The End of Our Time – Nicolas Berdyaev

             

Only one or two of the twenty-one books I didn’t finish: The Greek Tyrants and War and Human Progress.

 

5.

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.Besides the overflowing library with many unread books in upstairs study, my Kindle also contains books that I haven’t gotten to or have stopped reading. I use the Kindle because there’s no more room for hard copy books in my house. I have gotten rid of a hundred or more but this seems to be the limit. I can’t part with the rest.

Many people eschew the Kindle because it doesn’t feel like they are reading a book. This rationalizes a predilection for the printed page, suggesting resistance to the insidious advance of the Digital Age. I’m not sure how consistent these people are, not knowing their magazine and newspaper reading habits. I have no problem reading Harpers, New Yorker, and Atlantic articles online. The great Serbian writer, Milorad Pavic, author of The Dictionary of the Khazars, before he died a few years ago, had several books and plays available online and dependent on the choices an internet book permits.

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Reluctant as I was to use the Kindle at first, I accepted its necessity and soon was publishing my own work on Kindle. I have six books on the Amazon Kindle, one is novel that is also in paperback and another originally was published as an e-book. Sales have been sparse, even when I reduced the prices more than 60%. One might expect friends (real and Facebook) and relatives to purchase them, but it seems not as many own a Kindle as I thought would (or they have Nooks).

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To facilitate reading on Kindle, I try to buy books less than 250 pages. Longer works seem to take forever, especially as the percentage of the book one has read is at the bottom of the page. Doing ten pages or even fifteen, and remain on the same percent number is, frankly, depressing. There are exceptions to this, usually non-fiction works that I can put down (as if I’m reading a hardcopy):

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Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson (author of Men Who Stare at Goats) – one of the interesting pieces from this book is called “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes”, which he also made into a film (I’ve added the link).

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A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

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Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George – this work opened me to a level of reality in the world I had barely thought of.

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One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman – My writing mentor, Paul West, suffered a severe stroke in 2005 and suffered aphasia. Ackerman took it upon herself to retrieve her husband’s ability to speak and grow his vocabulary. West had been able to compose a memoir and novels before he died in 2015. I have read those works except the final one, Red in Tooth and Claw, which I started but only made it to page five. West’s fiction has sometimes given me fits and “stops”: The Fifth of November, The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, and Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun.

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I have used Kindle to pick up four works by another of my favorite authors, Flann O’Brien. Myles Away from Dublin is a collection of his newspaper pieces not found in the Dublin Times, where his most famous column, Cruiskeen Lawn, ran for thirty years. Myles before Myles includes O’Brien’s work before 1940. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play, a comedy, was produced in Dublin in 1943. The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien collects five stories from the Irish, nine stories in English, and an unfinished novel.

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Kindle books can be inexpensive and I found one by my uncle, Trevor Nevitt Dupuy, a military historian, The Battle of Austerlitz, and another by his father, Col. Ernest Dupuy, St Vith: The Lion in the Way (the 106th Infantry Division in World War II).

Then there are several that were free:

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Bertha Garlan – a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote Dream Story (the source for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) --  unread

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Memoirs of Aaron Burr – over 600 pages, mostly unread; I have strong feelings that Burr is one of the most underestimated of the Founding Fathers. Two other books on my Kindle are Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study on Character by Roger E. Kennedy and Jefferson’s Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary by Joseph Wheelen.

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Shakespeare’s Othello

 

On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

 

Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy

 

Homer and Classical Philology – Friedrich Nietzsche

 

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume (unread)

 

We Philologists – from the Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 8)

 

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions – Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Eureka: A Prose Poem – Edgar Allen Poe (mostly unread)

 

6.

 

I saved for last another 1100 page extravaganza. Perhaps I should go to the Balkans for a year. No Internet. No radio or television. No newspapers. Nothing. Just me and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

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It details the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia in the late 1930s. It was the most pleasurable book I never finished (or read only 15 to 20% of). It’s the nonfiction counterpart to Infinite Jest. Immense, informative, stylistically impeccable. I could partly blame the smallness of the print on the page that ground one to a near halt. But no, bigger print would turn its 1100 pages into 1400 or 1800, or 2000. pages. I have gone back to it many times and, still, have not admitted unconditional surrender.

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Then I toy with the idea of purchasing two works by Arno Schmidt. Even though I had not been able to make headway into his Novella – 6 Act Play, The School for Atheists. His shorter works are as difficult as anyone has written, but I have gotten through and enjoyed The Egghead Republic (I even read another translation of it, Republica Intelligentsia). But well beyond these, lay two continental-like works, both beckoning me to embark to their literary land. The first, Evening Edged in Gold, is a physically massive work, such that a friend who had bought it kept it atop his refrigerator. The title itself is massive: Evening Edged in Gold: A FairytaleFarse – 55 Scenes from the Cou/untryside for Patrons of Erra/ota. I never borrowed it but did touch it and open its massive body. I may have heard an inner voice telling me to borrow it but at that point, as mentioned early in this piece, I had begun to run out of room for physical books. But Schmidt wasn’t done with me. Dalkey Archive Press published Bottom’s Dream, a 1496 page book that resided in a box. Only $750, arriving at a time in my life that I could afford it.

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Perhaps, around the same time, I was gradually realizing that my pursuit of books was intertwined with having the book in hand. And I was losing the desire to fulfill this need. Probably, why I could make the move to Kindle. Thus, having Bottom’s Dream or Evening Edged in Gold no longer fit with my changing psyche. They would be less “books” than coffee table books, in which they were the tables.

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I can’t hide from my books. I know they are the second. Some waiting for a chance to impress me. Now, though, a newer obsession reveals itself. Every few weeks I pick out a novel that I read 30 or 40 years ago or, more likely, a series of books by my preferred authors. At least the shorter Pones. Monsieur Levert by Robert Pinget, not The Inquisitory; his last works were often under 100 pages. More likely As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, not Absolam, Absolam. And many of Iris Murdoch’s books from her early years: Under the Net (a book dedicated to Raymond Queneau) and A Severed Head, not the later Nuns and Soldiers or The Message to the Planet.