September 7, 2010
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My Luck With Novels is Changing…
After last Chinese New Year I kind of soured on the novels I was reading. I took two books with me, but had the time to read at least four or five while we relaxed on the beach in Thailand. My mistake. I did take two great books with me and they were nice to just sit and read on the front porch of a little hut we rented on the beach each night as the sun set over the water and we both sat and read until we fell asleep in our deck chairs. We both read the Gabriel Garcia Marquez short novel The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor which just blew me away, and I also read Issac Asomov’s The Caves of Steel. I’m not usually a sci-fi fan, but when I do find one I like, I can really get into it. After that, I guess I just didn’t go with the right books. I read two different books about Thailand, one by french author Michel Houellebecq titled Platform which if it wasn’t for the sex scenes in the book I would have needed a fork to stick in my leg to keep me from nodding off every few minutes. Supposedly he’s a groundbreaking author, but when a third of the novel is just technical writing about the resort industry around the world at that time, even some really well written sex scenes can’t keep my attention.
I also read Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks. This book had potential and it basically took that potential and took a great big dump right on it. The only thing that kept me reading was the fact that the book takes place on the same island and beach I spent my Chinese New Year, but the book is just written in such a bad way. The author was obviously writing about himself and tried to make his ex-girlfriend look bad in the book (both at the beginning and the end of the book) but really managed to make himself and the lead character look like assholes. From the first chapter the main character is a self centered prick and maybe he is supposed to turn into an understanding, love struck man when he meets the Thai girl who gives him massages every day (much better plot for a porn I think), but really you just end up thinking he’s an idiot. Even the Thai girl, who is supposed to be the epitome of exotic passions comes off as a bit of an annoying tease. All the little reviews on the book talk about rooting for them to finally make their relationship work with the cultural differences, but I was hoping for an ending like Platform had… (SPOILERS) with machine gun fire, Muslim extremists and a little shock and awe. But no… just a poor boy who can’t stop loving a girl he can’t have and, of course, one last shot at the ex-girlfriend by insinuating that she had a threesome after they broke off while he ‘learned of the plight of the poor Thai people’. I love you Jeri for sending it to me, and I enjoyed hating it from the very first sentence to the very last. At least it made me realize something… I can write better than this in my sleep!!!
At last count I had only read 27 novels since January of 2009 which went back and forth from good to bad and back again. I wanted to keep pace of at least two novels a month, but sometimes after a run of a few bad novels you don’t want to jump into another one too fast for fear of yet another letdown. I grabbed some books from my shelves in Canada before boxing them all up from my friend’s house and placing them in one of the closets in my parent’s house (also taking about 50 books out that can go to a used book shop), and I bought a few from Amazon as well to try to give me something to read that I really wanted. I went back to some old favorites like Vonnegut, Coupland, Spillane and Goldman and added a book I was told to search for titled World War Z (which I am saving for the next beach I sit on).
I found an old copy of Edgar Allen Poe short stories I had never read and was just blown away by things like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat and The Masque of the Red Death. Then I read the short novel Leaf Storm by Marquez. Not his best, but a solid story with very solid characters which is the thing I really like about him.
After that I got into the Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer novels. Old detective novels are just damn cool, dripping with testosterone, cigarette smoke and opening lines as simple and perfect as “The guy was dead as hell.” Mickey Spillane just knew how to tell a story from the point of view of a real man with no worries of political correctness or people calling him a sexist. He just spoke the truth from his point of view. You could write pages about exactly how a woman looked to try to capture her beauty or let Mickey just write words like “Whatever a dame’s supposed to have on the ball, she’s got it. My tongue feels an inch thick when I talk to her and if she asked me to jump I’d say, ‘How high?’”
I bought Cat’s Cradle back in university and it sat on my shelf for years before finally being taken half way around the world to be read. I loved Galapagos and Welcome to the Monkey House so Cat’s Cradle had a lot to live up to, but wow, did it ever surpass my expectations. Vonnegut was way to ahead of his time in his writing I think and this book with so many different sub-stories is so well pieced together, all interlinked with the genius invention ‘Ice-9′. I’m having a hard time not just reading everything Vonnegut has written now because of this book, but I like to spread an author out.Years ago I was tuned on to Douglas Coupland by, well, a flash in the pan so to speak, who raved about his work to no end. She was right about most of it, but although I do fit in the category, I just couldn’t get into Generation X. I was hesitant about reading the latest Generation A, as they keep referring to it as a modern X, but it is so much more. The tale of five strangers who are stung by bees in a world where the bee population has long since disappeared. The story speak to so many realities and ideas the way Coupland always does, but it’s the stories within the story that got me. The characters (for reasons I will not divulge) begin creating original tales which are told in the book. Each tale is cool in it’s own right, but the one that I re-read about ten times was ‘Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis’. A quick, funny tale about Superman and a bartender to me tells the story of society today and where most are headed. And… I either love or hate Coupland’s endings depending on the book, and I have to say, this one is up there as one of his strangest, and best to date.
So, what do I read now? More Vonnegut or Marquez? Something different, or more short story collections (which I have many waiting their turn)? I haven’t read any Elmore Leonard in a while and I still have books here from a few years back waiting patiently to take me away for a while. Animals Taiwan had a used book sale last week where I picked up four more novels (mainly to give more to the group who helps me with the CNR of the street cats around my area) and I got a cheap copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I avoided this book before after the disastrous and torturous No Country For Old Men (both the book and the movie), but I figured either my luck will hold out and this book will be good or I chose my bad book wisely and the next one will be good again. I started it yesterday, leery of what may come from it and McCarthy’s strange writing style. All I have to say is I stayed at the gym and did an extra hour of cardio today so I didn’t have to stop reading it.
Maybe my luck with books is holding out after all…
