Carlos plays it fast & loose with the 1010 Challenge

This is my third year taking part in one of these challenges, and I have to admit I approach with a little weariness. Overall, I've enjoyed the challenges, especially when I hit upon a really interesting theme. (Such as Thugggee or, in 2008, Gothic classics.)

This year, though, I was looking over the cyclopean TBR pile and didn't feel too happy about the categories I was drawing up. And from there, I got to feeling a little frustration at all the times someone has suggested a book to me, and I've thought, Damn, doesn't fit into any of my categories; well, maybe next year...

Of course, I'm writing this, so I am going to continue with the 1010 challenge this year, but I'm going to play it a little looser. For one, I'm not laying out all the categories ahead of time. I've got a few I know will make up a good chunk of my reading, and I'll put those up now. Otherwise, I'm just going to see what I wind up reading and how those books can coherently be placed into categories.

Additionally, I'm giving myself unlimited overlaps. In the past, I've avoided these, since they felt a bit like cheating. But I'd like to take on some bigger books this year, including several anthologies, and feel I deserve all the leeway I want. So, with all of that prologue, here is my 1010 Challenge.

I. Short Story Collections
II. Cien años de senderos que bifurcan
III. Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines
IV. Weird Tales
V. It Came from the Bookshelf!
VI. A Series Subject
VII. What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
VIII. Novels on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
IX. The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
X. Poetry & Prose

The first category will be short story collections. These will all be single author collections, including a couple of collected works. (I thought about trying to break those up into the individual books but thought it might get a bit complicated.)

I. Short Story Collections
1. Cuentos Completos - Roberto Arlt
2. Horacio Quiroga - Cuentos vol. I
3. Historias fantasticas - Adolfo Bioy Casares
4. Cuentos Completos 2 - Julio Cortazar
5. Pastoralia
6. Viaje Olvidado
7. El Milagro y otros cuentos
8. Aqui vivieron
9. Tinieblas
10. El pais del humo

This category will be Argentina-themed. This means a good deal of Argentine authors, though if I come across an intriguing book set in or about Argentina, it'll go here as well.

PS: I've added Colombia to the mix, since there are several works that I've become interested in reading. I wasn't sure what to do with the category name, so I opted for this mash-up of famous titles from Borges and Garcia Marquez (the best known literary figures of the two respective countries).

II. Cien años de senderos que bifurcan
1. Los Ejercitos
2. Met, el Muerto
3. Raucho
4. Aguafuertes Porteñas
5. Los Almuerzos
6. Los gauchos judios
7. La virgen de los sicarios
8. No Place for Heroes
9. Vestigios
10. Juan Moreira

One of my favorite modes of story telling (since it's not exactly a genre) is the Gothic, which has its origins in the 18th Century but continues to be a source of inspiration for some fascinating fictions.

III. Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray
2. Jane Eyre
3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
4. The Unicorn
5. Wide Sargasso Sea
6. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
7. The Sundial
8. Rebecca
9. Bellefleur
10. Usher's Passing

The weird tale, or weird fiction, is in some sense a transitional form, an outgrowth of the Gothic which also serves as a precursor to the modern horror genre (and fantasy and science fiction, as well). Lately, it's seen an interesting new evolution in the New Weird subgenre.

IV. Weird Tales
1. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 1: The World of Horror
2. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
3. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
4. The King of Elfland's Daughter
5. The Great God Pan and the Hill of Dreams
6. Alraune
7. The Dark Domain
8. Weird Tales
9. Finch
10. Mr. George and Other Odd Persons

V. It Came from the Bookshelf!
1. I Am Legend
2. Fevre Dream
3. The Hungry Moon
4. Harvest Home
5. Fledgling
6. The Cipher
7. Julia
8. The Painted Darkness
9. Usher's Passing
10. Neverland

VI. A Series Subject
1. Offspring
2. Three Hainish Novels
3. A Game of Thrones
4. Books of Blood Vol. 2
5. Toby Alone
6. Toby and the Secrets of the Tree
7. Finch
8. Gormenghast
9. Las caras y las mascaras
10. Cuentos Completos 2 - Julio Cortazar

I've decided to perk up my category names a bit, starting with this new category. It was originally going to be called The Lovecraft Legacy, but this is a little more fun. (Besides that sounds like a thriller title. Anyone up for a Bourne/Cthulhu mashup?) Covering works inspired by and dealing with H.P. Lovecraft and his fiction.

VII. What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
1. The Azathoth Cycle
2. The Watchers Out Of Time
3. Lovecraft Unbound
4. The Lurker at the Threshold
5. Move Under Ground
6. Lovecraft: A Biography
7. Lovecraft (graphic novel)
8. Los Mitos de Cthulhu
9. The Cthulhu Cult
10. A Dreamer and a Visionary

The second of my category names to be perked up. Was looking for some sort of catch-all phrase for experimental, kaleidoscopic, fix-up and otherwise just oddly structured novels.

VIII. Novels on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
1. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna
2. Adan Buenosayres
3. Rayuela
4. Respiracion Artificial
5. Sombras, nada mas
6. Survivor
7. Einstein's Dreams
8. The Raw Shark Texts
9. City of Saints and Madmen
10. Haunted

Despite my substantial TBR pile, there are definitely some books that merit a reread. Some are old favorites, some I enjoyed but felt I only scratched the surface of, and others I didn't like but feel they merit a second look.

IX. The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
1. Moby Dick; or, The Whale
2. Wuthering Heights
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. City of Saints and Madmen
5. Nombre Falso
6. The Weird Tale
7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
8. The Scarlet Letter
9. Haunted
10. El Aleph

X. Poetry & Prose
1. Halloween: New Poems
2. Fausto y otros poemas
3. El otro, el mismo
4. Horizonte de suceso
5. Fungi from Yuggoth and other poems
6. Almafuerte
7. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
8. Junk Fiction: America's Obsession with Bestsellers
9. Selected Poems, 1956-1968
10. Hint Fiction

Book Started: Cuentos Completos - Roberto Arlt
Category: Short Stories
Possible overlap categories: Argentina

Roberto Arlt is considered a seminal figure in Argentine and Latin American literature, yet remains obscure in the English-speaking world. His works often focus on socially marginalized individuals who chose to act out or conspire in (sexually, criminally and politically) bizarre ways, often with unintended results. (I'd say he can be thought of as an Argentine Chuck Palahniuk, but it'd be more accurate to say Palahniuk is a yanqui Roberto Arlt.)

So, I'm kicking off the challenge with the complete collection of his short stories and all their vulgar, violent, cynical and wildly inventive glory. The first of the stories is "El jorobadito" (The Little Hunchback) in which a neurotic young man attempts to break off an engagement with the help of what he perceives as an individual representative of the dregs of society. Things don't turn out quite as he expects.

Peace on earth, goodwill to men.

I'm glad you're back, Carlos! I've enjoyed learning about new authors through your posts. What I like about this challenge is that it lets you make it a custom fit.

Hmm...trying hard to think of a Gothic horror series set in Argentina for your challenge...

Happy to see you here again and like how you've adapted the challenge to suit your reading. I've also loosened the strings on my challenge this year and made my categories more general.
I recently read The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez (Argentina), quite interesting with a touch of magical realism on the theme of owning books.

Hi,

Not a huge fan of the one Palahniuk I have read (Haunted) but I am still intrigued by your review of Cuentos completos, going to have to track down a copy.

I see you have a few of Jeff VanderMeer's books in your library, I cannot wait to get to his new book Finch.

@16 It was only yesterday I realised Finch was out, after reading about it on psutto's thread. I'm reading Veniss Underground for my 1010, but am going to have to find a way of cramming the new Ambergris novel in there too... Very cool seeing so many VanderMeer fans in this challenge!

Ooh, The Paper House sounds really fascinating. I'm a fan of books featuring mysterious books. I'll have to look into it, or at least be on the lookout for it.

@16, I didn't think much of Haunted, either, though I may try to reread it. (I was thinking of devoting a category to rereads, both things I'd previously liked and hated.) The similarities are mostly along the lines of fiction about people alienated from society who act out in rather strange ways. I've also seen Arlt compared to Irvine Welsh or William Burroughs, but I'm less familiar with those authors than I am Palahniuk.

There was an interesting podcast about Arlt I listened to a while ago: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/08/20/segments/84098.

I also translated a short story of his on my blog: http://azolotl.blogspot.com/2009/02/red-moon-by-roberto-arlt.html. It's a bit rough and too literal, but I hope it captures enough of the original story.

Also looking forward to Finch, which I have to get a copy of.

#17 ah well I am waiting to borrow psutto's copy! I blame him for getting me hooked on VanderMeer :)

#18 Thanks for the links. I haven't read Welsh or Burroughs, I always keep meaning to but I haven't yet got round to it!

Book Started: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Category: Gothic
Possible overlap categories: Weird Tales, Horror

I'm doing this one as part of the group read, so I'm hoping to finish it quickly. I wasn't sure how to label it, but decided to put it under Gothic. (Which I confess may be a somewhat arbitrary decision.) This is one of these I've been telling myself I need to read for ages, so it's good to finally get around to it.

Carlos, somehow I lost track of your 2009 thread. I just read it from the top. I should count it as a book. ;) A very interesting reading year you had. Maybe I won't lose ya this year.

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - finished 12/7/09

This was quite good though at times a little strange for reasons not entirely to do with the novel itself. This is the first work I've read by Oscar Wilde, but I have seen film adaptations of both The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. All three works feature a similar character who is a sort of lovable cad capable of keeping up a witty repartee while poking fun at British stuffiness. (Played by Rupert Everett in the above films.) In Earnest and Husband, he turns out to have a heart of gold and settles down at the end. His counterpart in Gray is Lord Henry, who never reforms and ends up contributing to Dorian's downfall. So, there was a real frisson when Harry was around because suddenly there was something rotten about that witty Wilde repartee. It's a bit like the end of Huckleberry Finn, when Tom Sawyer shows up and ends up being just annoying instead of helpful. (Except if Tom's advice ended up being harmful instead of just pointless.)

Not much else I can add at the moment, but certainly a striking book.

Book Started: The Azathoth Cycle
Category: What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
Possible overlap categories: Horror, Weird Fiction

I've added another couple of categories. The Lovecraft category is going to be ripe for overlaps with the Gothic, weird and horror ones, so I hesitated to add it. But the more I looked at my TBR pile, the more I realized there were certain types of books that were more common than others. A good portion of these books were the sort I thought of as fun whatever their status as literature.

This is a good example of one of those books. It's a Cthulhu Mythos anthology from Chaosium in which stories are collected from a variety of authors related to some Lovecraftian theme. Azathoth is Lovecraft's parody or inversion of the traditional concept of an omnipotent deity, though his exact status varies somewhat depending on the particular story. There's a nice little introduction with the possible influences on the character and how it evolved over time.

Then the anthology proper starts with a little faekout. The first item is a poem named "Azathoth," attributed to Edward Pickman Derby. There's even a brief biographical intro, which mentions the author's family problems and tragic homicide. SPOILER WARNING It's all a Lovecraftian in-joke, since Edward Pickman Derby is a character in "The Thing on the Doorstep," who published a collection of poems called Azathoth and Other Horrors before being murdered. From what I can tell the poem was actually written by Clark Ashton Smith a friend and fellow weird author of Lovecraft. END SPOLERS

It's an odd poem, but features some good imagery and establishes a nice mood of strangeness.

Random thoughts, Or Meditations on Dorian Gray, Arlt and Lovecraft...

I'm still working on Arlt's Cuentos Completos, so after finishing Dorian Gray and then reading a couple of the Azathoth stories, I wound up reading Arlt's "Las Fieras" (The Beasts), a story that left a very strong impression on me the first time I read it. There's not really much of a plot, just a guy describing his life of crime, gambling, drinking and prostitution. He shares a companionship of sorts with other men in a similar situation. There's something about the language with which Arlt captures that life that really makes you feel the grime and sadness of it. It actually parallels Dorian Gray nicely.

It also brings up an interesting thought about Cthulhu Mythos tales, such as the ones in Azathoth. Since they're modeled largely on Lovecraft's own stories, they often figure protagonists who are relatively innocent. They may let their curiosity lead them into bad spots, but they rarely choose to do anything really awful. In a way I see a parallel between Arlt's fieras and the Lovecraftian protagonist who has encountered the forbidden, yet Lovecraft's protag remains an essentially innocent victim.

I realize that this is probably not of much interest to anyone, but sometimes I am tempted to play the whole compare/contrast game with authors who fascinate me.

Welcome to the challenge, Carlos!

I am very interested in Roberto Arlt -- Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors and I have both William S. Burroughs and Irvine Welsh on my challenge list this year -- but I can't seem to find an English edition of Cuentos Completos. I did, however, find some of his novels -- The Mad Toy and The Seven Madmen -- in the local library system so they have been added to my wishlist.

I've starred your thread and I'll be looking forward to what you put in your Gothic and Weird Fiction categories. (:

I usually don't care for Gothic stories, but one that I do highly recommend is A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan. Caveat: It is written in the second person.

One that was too Gothic for me, but very popular, is Asylum by Patrick McGrath.

Too Gothic? Perish the thought. :) I've already got some books tentatively set aside for the category, from the early days of the genre to some pretty modern stuff.

remus, I'd recommend The Seven Madmen. Of the two, it's definitely the one that's closer to Palahniuk--a little more twisted and outrageous. Sadly, very little of Arlt's works are available in translation. I suspect there may be a few translated short stories that have been anthologized.

interested to see what you will be reading under the Nervous Breakdown category. i got one which will fit your definition -- Hunger by Knut Hamsun. a good number of Japanese novels might fit in there, too -- those by Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima.

Given your description of the Nervous Breakdown category, I would imagine the bigger works by Pynchon and Delillo would fit. For something shorter and more accessible, I would recommend Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Hunger sounds interesting. My definition is pretty open, so it might qualify. But I did have in mind stuff more like Pynchon or Delillo. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler--well, I have to admit that's one I've been telling myself I should read for a couple years now.

I added some of the books I've got in mind to the various categories. All subject to change, of course. I also tweaked how the books appear. Once I start reading a book, it'll get the brackets. Finished books get bolded as well.

For something light and funny for your experimental category, check out The feverhead by Wolfgang Bauer. It's written entirely in letters from two people who try to have a correspondence. But the letters are laways sent simoultaneously, so that they always cross. Pretty soon it travels into some farily surreal landscapes indeed.

I'm sure you've read Perec already. But if you haven't, both A void (a novel not containing the letter E) and Life, A user's manual (a novel structured around the movement of chess pieces) would fit the bill, I think.

I just purchased Life, A user's manual, and am looking forward to reading it. I don't mean to hijack the thread, but do you (or anyone) have an opinion as to whether Life of A Void is the better novel?

Life, A user's manual in my opinion. A void is mostly interesting as an experiment. My favourite Perec is probably W, or the Memory of childhood though, a less cerebral read than both of the above.

2. The Azathoth Cycle by Robert M. Price (editor) - finished 1/13/10

I went through a period of reading quite a bit of Mythos fiction before pretty much giving up on it. It's not bad, but I finally came to the conclusion that most of it was derivative and forgettable. The same could be said about many of the stories in this anthology, but they're also fun in a comfort food sort of way.

In an odd way, they're a bit like paranormal romances or sexy vampire fiction. But whereas (I believe) paranormal romances draw on the fact that the vampire myth has sex somewhere in its core, the Mythos story is it's geekier cousin--more interested in books, symbols, knowledge. Reading these stories, I found myself enjoying even the ones that weren't even scary at all. There's a sort of Borgesian pleasure in seeing the way different authors grapple with HPL's themes about humanity's relationship with the universe and their awareness of it.

There were some stories that worked genuinely well on their own. Burleson's "The Daemon-Sultan" captured much of the feeling of Lovecraft's dreamland stories, and Ligotti can always be counted on to bring the weird--his "The Sect of the Idiot" is a pretty solid story.

Overall a nice collection containing a good balance of (oft tongue-in-cheek) pastiche and originality.

Book Started: Moby-Dick
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
Possible overlap categories: Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

My previous "read" of Moby-Dick was via audiobook, so I thought it would be fun to go back and actually confront the text itself. The volume I own has a short biography of Melville which describes his early life, which included living among South Sea cannibals for a little while. Another interesting fact was that Melville appears to have been something of an autodidact as a writer. He read extensively in older works, such as Shakespeare and Milton. Part of the reason that Moby-Dick was such a flop when it came out was that his style was considered too archaic and artificial at the time. (That's an odd parallel with Lovecraft--not that I'd claim HPL is of the same caliber, prose-wise, as Melville.)

Anyway, one thing that surprised me and which I really like about Moby-Dick is the humor. I especially liked Ishmael's statement that "a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it."

On another note, Arlt continues to surprise. "The Phantom Suit" is a delirious Gothic voyage (a la Vathek). I was going to resist comparisons to Lovecraft, but in a story with so many unnameables and a "Cyclopean walls of vegitation" it's pretty hard to resist.

I have started Moby Dick three times and I still haven't made it out to sea! I think I'm am just not ever going to finish that book.

I agree that Moby Dick is quite funny at places. One of my favorite scenes comes early in the novel when Starbuck goes to bed early and awakes in the middle of the night to find Queequeg crawling into bed with him.

#37 -- If you do audiobooks, I'd recommend giving it a shot that way. I enjoyed it, but there were definitely parts I may have got stuck on as a reader. (Hopefully won't happen now, but we'll see.)

Book Started: Museo de la Novela de la Eterna
Category: Novels on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
Possible overlap categories: Argentina

Macedonio Fernandez was an interesting part of the literary scene in Argentina in the early to mid 20th century. Though educated as a lawyer, he gave up law practice in his 40s to write poetry, fiction and philosophy. His philosophical and often playful approach to fiction is reflected in many of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he was friends.

Though arguably one of the first experimental novels written in Latin America, Museo de la Novela de la Eterna was not published until 1967, 15 years after Macedonio's death and deep into the "Latin Boom."

The first half of the book is actually made up of prologues to the novel itself, in which Macedonio appears to discuss, justify or question the nature of fiction, novels, characters, etc. I have to admit, I don't follow 100%, but it is interesting.

Book Started: The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, Vol 1: The World of Horror
Category: Weird Tales
Possible overlap categories: Horror (it's right there in the title)

I'm finding it easiest to absorb both the Arlt stories and Macedonio's counterintuitive reflections on Art in small stretches, so I decided to break it up a little with some Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce was a real character who was probably known best for The Devil's Dictionary--a sardonic take on language, religion, politics and human nature in general. He is one of the most famous people ever to have disappeared without a trace, as he disappeared shortly after entering Mexico to report on Pancho Villa's revolution. (His last days were fictionalized by Carlos Fuentes in Gringo Viejo.)

I'm only a few stories in but so far really enjoying them. Many make use of the Western milieu to good effect. Bierce is very concise--no piling on of Gothic adjectives here--managing to use simple facts like the ruggedness of terrain or the isolation of the frontier to provide that sense of eeriness. Some stories also feature his sardonic sense of humor.

I'm glad you're enjoying his short stories. I loved The Devil's Dictionary and was debating getting his Realm of the Unreal and Other Stories. Since his short stories sound equally good, I think I'll bite the bullet.

Book Started: I Am Legend
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!, or the Category Formerly Known as Horror
Possible overlap categories: Weird Tales (though it's a stretch)

I'd had this one loaded on my mp3 player for about a week now and decided to start it today. I've seen two of the movie adaptations (the Heston and Smith ones) so I'm already pretty familiar with the overall arc of the novel. The beginning is quite good, the spareness of the prose creating a sense of isolation and despair. It's actually a little bit of a disappointment when night falls. The tonal shift from spare prose and quiet despair to hysteria doesn't quite work, though I think it's not an uncommon weakness for horror fiction. (Or at least I've previously had similar feelings about Dean Koontz and Brian Keene.) That weakness aside, it's a pretty captivating portrayal of a isolation and resistance.

3. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna by Macedonio Fernandez - finished 1/28/10

The title translates as Museum of Eterna's Novel. I'm not sure where the Museum comes in, but I can tell you that Eterna is a character (one of several who seems to be as much abstract concept as literary character) and Novel (or "La Novela") is the name of a house outside the city of Buenos Aires. Between that title and the multiple prologues, you can probably guess that the novel is going to be a doozy. Oh, you bet. This is an anti-novel or a novel of frustration, where the action is frequently interrupted for philosophical speculation or poetry on the nature of love and eternity. Sometimes, "the author" will step in and explain what he's trying to do or lecture the characters; or "the reader" will show up and make a comment.

Macedonio's goal with the novel is to question or undermine all the old assumptions about what constitutes a novel, fiction, narrative, and so pave the way for new literary traditions. It's hard to know how to judge a novel as intentionally frustrating as Museo, though I did often find the language quite enjoyable: often funny or ironic, sometimes poetic and beautiful.

Bottom line: This is the sort of novel in which a little over halfway through, one of the characters begins to describe a novel he's writing which is full of characters that are even more like abstractions and which has even less of a plot. If that doesn't send you running for the hills, I definitely recommend checking this out. (And if you are interested, the good news is that an English translation is set to come out in February.)

Also, here's an interesting article on the links between Macedonio and Borges: http://quarterlyconversation.com/macedonio-fernandez-jorge-luis-borges


4. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson - finished 1/29/10

It's funny how a novel can seem so well constructed on one level yet simultaneously sloppy on another level. The story, which follows Robert Neville as he struggles to fight off the vampire plague while maintaining the last shreds of his sanity and humanity, has a brilliant, stark simplicity to it. The language he uses to describe it, though, veers from flat to overwrought in ways that kept taking me out of the story. This probably sounds odd coming from someone who lists Lovecraft among his favorite authors, but the difference is that Lovecraft has a style. It may be somewhat verbose and archaic, occasionally overwrought, but he sticks to it, giving his stories a cohesiveness or integrity. Matheson, on the other hand, starts with a very plain description of Neville's working around the house and shifts into full on Gothic "his heart pounded like lunatics beating against the walls of the asylum" purple-osity once nighttime falls. I know the guy is fighting insanity, but it's the equivalent of second-rate horror movies where they turn up the scare chords to 11 because otherwise, you know, how would you know if anything scary was happening?

But, like I said, the story itself was quite good. There was a realism to Neville's response. Yes, he is resourceful, but it's clear he's just a guy, overwhelmed by what has happened in his world. The odds are so against him that we're never even really sure what the odds are. His desperation for any kind of company, especially his reaction to finding a dog one day, are very poignant. If Matheson's style had more closely matched his sense of story, this would have been a real masterpiece.

#32 - A Late note ... Life, a user's manual is not about chess pieces but jigsaw puzzle (pieces), and not just about them, it is, in a way, a puzzle itself. Very fitting in the category.

Another interesting, though a little bit lighter, experiment in structure & format is 253 or http://www.ryman-novel.com/

I read it last year, and when I 'finished' it I wasn't sure if I really did read all of it.

@Jigsaw puzzle is thematically absolutely a very central image in Life, a user's manual. But apparently, the way the stories "move" within the apartment building, the way we go from flat to flat is based on the movement of chess pieces (something like the movement of the knight pieces, in a clockwise rotation...). As a recall it, it was rather intricately described in a preface in the edition I read. I would never have spotted it myself, mind you...

I must have missed that, or we have different editions. Was the preface you mention the one by the author, the one that is repeated in chapter 44? Or something by someone else.

Not trying to say you're wrong, just curious ... and wondering about the state of my own memory. Maybe I just became so obsessed with jigsaw themes along with Bartlebooth that I only saw the jigsaw puzzle in the structure also. Will have to check when I get back home to the book.

I Should be working but how? with these important matters at the back on one's mind... But you're right. The ordering of the chapters re the layout of the building is shown here http://www.borderschess.org/Perec.htm ... Knight's Tour, indeed.

A bit more complicated than my feeble "rotating clockwise", but still... :)

5. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, Vol 1: The World of Horror - finished 2/1/10

Overall, a pretty nice collection of horror stories, featuring some repeated themes but also more varied than I originally had them pegged. Some of the conventions that Bierce relies on (such as people dying from a fright) are a little dusty, nor is he entirely immune to verbosity, but the best of these are pretty satisfying incidents of spookiness. Bierce's weird tales are probably most distinctive for their twisted sense of humor, though that's not entirely evident in all of the tales.

Book Started: The Weird Tale
Category: Weird Tales
Possible overlap categories: The Library of the Infinite Return, What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?

I picked this up years ago based mostly on what I knew of it's author, S. T. Joshi. Not only had he arguably had been a big part in bringing Lovecraft into the literary mainstream but what little of his I had read had struck me as pretty interesting. At the time I read it, I knew very little about five of the six authors that Joshi covers. (Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Ambrose Bierce being the five of whom I knew little save their names. Lovecraft being the sixth.) It was an interesting read, but I suspect I didn't get as much out of it as I would have had I a little more familiarity with those five authors, and now that I've resolved to read those authors, I thought it might be a good time to revisit Joshi's work.

I've read the introduction and the chapter on Bierce so far. The former lays out Joshi's goal of dealing with the unique attributes of weird fiction and it's relationship to the worldviews of the authors who work in that genre. He also notes the limits in discussing it as a genre, since it's boundaries with genres such as fantasy or suspense fiction are problematic.

The chapter on Bierce addresses Bierce's cynicism, which Joshi seems sympathetic to, though he admits it lacks much in the way of philosophical coherence. There's also the interesting concept that Bierce's primary mode of writing was satirical, whether he was working in fiction or non-fiction, fantasy or war stories. Of Bierce's most controversial stories, which jauntily mention killing parents or infants, Joshi notes that...

Who is being satirized here? Who but the reader?It is as if Bierce is daring us to find these things funny. Bierce can't lose: if we are revolted, than he can merely chuckle and heap contempt on us for our squeamishness; if we laugh, we stand self-condemned as sadists."

I'm almost tempted to call Bierce ahead of his time, beating Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and Chuck Palahniuk to the punch by about a century.

I'll save the other chapters until I get to the authors discussed.

Book Started: Los ejercitos
Category: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

It was this article in the Nation which got me interested in Evilio Rosero's The Armies about a fictional town suddenly terrorized by forces they have no control over. I'm only into the first chapter so far, where the protagonist has been spying on his neighbors wife as she sunbathes nude.

Did you both like Life: A User's Manual? I read it a few years ago, and immediately wanted to read it again. It was so complex that I'm sure I would get more out of it from each rereading (as in multiple times). I love "puzzle" books. Perec must have been a genius to figure it all out, and not have it be boring or incomprehensible.

#51 - I did, and I'm quite sure I'll read it again some day. You put it just right in your last sentence above.

@51 I really liked it too. I'm very likely to read it again someday (even though I will miss being unaware of that tiny jigsaw twist at the end). My favourite Perec is W, or the memory of childhood though.

Sorry, all, I haven't kept up. Been pretty distracted as of late, but I'll try to keep posting, although in shorter form for now.

6. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James - finished 2/17/10

Some good, albeit old-fashioned, English ghost stories. James was pretty much the master of this type of story, and although his works generally have a rather cultured tone that might strike the modern horror reader as dull, he's quite the hand at coming up with some frightening imagery and presenting it in quite a chilling way. Sometimes the stories do drift into seeming to be as obsessed with the machinery of story telling as they are with the malignant spirits roaming their pages, which gives some of them an almost Borgesian air. (And just when I was coming to this conclusion, I reached the final story, which features a labrynth.)


7. Los ejercitos by Evelio Rosero - finished 2/18/10

This novel about a small village in Colombia which gets caught in the fighting between rebels, narcotraffickers, paramilitaries, and the national army. As the story begins, it seems like it could be a modest village out of Garcia Marquez. Things begin to worsen gradually, until by the end it's practically a horror novel. Well-written but not the kind of thing I'd recommend if you're looking for the warm fuzzies.

Book Started: Jane Eyre
Category: Gothic Fiction

(Already about halfway through this one.) Well, to start, there may be some disagreement as to whether Jane Eyre is Gothic, but I think there's enough of those elements in there to make it qualify. Rochester is a pretty good Byronic hero, nicer than say Heathcliff, but still with quite a hypnotic dark side to him.

On another note, I hoped that reading this would help me retroactively appreciate The Eyre Affair more. Actually, it's the other way around. Affair has some parallels between the Jane-Rochester romance and the romance between Thursday Next and her guy (who I think was named Hillary something-something), even having the lawyer from Jane Eyre rushing in to stop Hillary something-something's marriage with some gold digger. But the Jane-Rochester romance is great because it's a passionate connection between two complex characters kept apart because of social mores. Thursday Next is mostly kept from getting together with Hillary something-something because he's very bland--no, wait, it's because he saw her brother acting stupidly in the Crimean War and she doesn't want to accept it (ie. because she is an idiot). Oh, will I ever stop bagging on The Eyre Affair?

Book Started: Met, el Muerto
Category: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

Also about halfway through this one. Last time I was in BA, I went on a bit of a book shopping spree. Along with works by recognized authors, I though I'd pick up some from people I'd never heard of, just based on the description. I figured I was likely to pick up some junk, but the thought of discovering something unexpectedly cool was too much to pass up. (And the exchange rate meant I could pick up some books for as low as around $2.50.)

This is rather an odd novel, about a writer who has achieved a low level of fame in Argentina after winning a book award. He's approached by a man who asks him to write about his life and death, the latter of which he expects to arrive in the next few months. The writer himself is kind of a jerk, and he has only a partial interest in actually writing the story, so it has some fits and starts, then some weird twists. Conversation, of which there is a lot, isn't set off by quotation marks or anything of the like, just sort of mashed up in paragraphs. (Ex: I told her she was an idiot. No, you're an idiot, what were you thinking doing that? What business is that of yours?) Not bad, though unless it's got a crackerjack ending, I don't think I'll be recommending it for anyone wanting to discover new Latin American authors.

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - finished 2/23/10

Normally, romance isn't high on my list of priorities fiction-wise, but the romantic element of this was just amazing. I am not afraid to admit the final reunion between Jane and Rochester had me tearing up. I think the Gothic grounding of the story makes the characters' oversized passions compelling and even plausible.


9. Met, el Muerto by Adrian Haidukowski - finished 2/23/10

I have to admit, this one never really gelled for me. There's some interesting scenes of contemporary Argentina and a smidgen of metafictional stuff as well, but ultimately I just didn't find it all that compelling.

I'm glad you liked Jane Eyre. I don't believe I've read any comments by males on Jane Eyre on LT, so your viewpoint is refreshing. :)

Thanks. I thought I'd like it, but thought it would run second to Wuthering Heights, which I really liked but is quite a bit darker. I'd have to say I like it as much, if not more. There is so much about Jane Eyre that is well-written. I really like the way Jane is written. There's that virtuous but poor aspect that would qualify her for a Dickens heroine, yet with an added level of personality, humor and intelligence. And her relationship with Rochester is well developed. (Although my 20th century sensibilities still cringed every time she referred to him as "master" in a romantic sense.)

10. Offspring by Jack Ketchum - finished 2/26/10

Falling a little behind again, so this will be a little brief. This one fell under Series Continued, since it is the sequel to Ketchum's Off Season. It would also have qualified as It Came from the Bookshelf! (Horror) Here's the brief review I wrote:

A decade later, Jack Ketchum returns to the territory of Off Season, the lonely woods of Maine, through which stalks the only member of the original clan to have survived. She has now grown and gathered a new family around her, feral and vicious as the first, to seek out new prey.

You may be wondering how Ketchum manages to top Off Season, which was brutally engrossing despite a few clichéd elements. Surprisingly, he doesn't, eschewing "the same, only bigger" strategy so common to sequels. Though the structure is the same--one night's encounter between a group of people and the deadly clan hunting them--Ketchum creates a more varied and complex cast of characters. Even the cannibal children have more personality than they did in the original.

Ketchum's prose has also improved, and the story feels a little more organic for it. Though very much along the same lines as the original, Offspring is actually somewhat richer and more emotionally complex. The only downside is that it fails to match the white-knuckle intensity of the original.

Book Started: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Category: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines (Gothic)

OK, another retroactive category rebranding. As with Jane Eyre, I have to admit this I'm not sure how Gothic it really is. The slight web search I've done so far emphasize the feminism or realism in the novel. At least the title is nicely Gothic. What I've read so far (just beyond the first chapter) has revealed some Gothic elements, such as Wildfell Hall itself and the mysterious woman who has taken up residence there.

Book Started: Fevre Dream
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!

George R. R. Martin's novel of vampires and riverboats. Might be closer to Dark Fantasy than Horror, but I am enjoying the details of antebellum riverboat life.

Hey Carlos!
I really enjoyed Fevre Dream as well. There's a mouldering manor house in it, so it might fit in your Gothic category if you really need it to.

I've had Fevre Dream on my wishlist for a while now but never seem to get it towards the top. Will look forward to your comments on it and hopefully it'll give it the push it seems to need.

Good call, Victoria! You can even think of the vampires as a (potentially) doomed line. I am really enjoying it. It's a little different in some ways but really well executed.

I agree. I can't wait for your review!

11. Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin - finished 3/4/10

Captain Abner Marsh once had a thriving shipping company, but a run of bad luck has left him with only one small aging boat. It appears his luck may be changing, as he receives an offer almost to good to be true from an eccentric gentleman interested in becoming owner of a riverboat. Soon, the two are paddling down the river in the Fevre Dream, the biggest, most glorious riverboat that Cap'n Marsh has ever laid eyes on. Yet, he can't help notice that his business partner's eccentricities are a little more extreme than he suspected.

Well, no point in being coy. This is a story about vampires, and the business partner, Joshua York, isn't just an eccentric millionaire. York has a mission, one that will put the Fevre Dream on a collision course with a very old and cruel vampire by the name of Damon Julian. The story is a little slow to get going, though Martin's writing makes all the details of riverboat life and the characters who populate it interesting enough to make it worthwhile and also adds greater depth once the vampire plot kicks into gear.

This is the first novel I've read by Martin, and I was pleasantly surprised. I already knew he could write a good horror story, having read several in a short story collection, but here he manages the task in a much more expansive setting.

Book Started: Survivor
Category: Novels on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown

I hadn't really intended to read this novel, but then I ran across it on my local libraries website as a downloadable audiobook. And since I'd always intended to read it, I figured I'd go ahead. (I had heard from some people that this is the best of his earlier novels.)

Though less radical than other works in the category, I figured it was unique enough to go alongside other experimental works. Hey, at least its chapters are numbered backwards. Also, the premise is that the whole novel is being narrated to the voice recorder of an airliner's black box by the protagonist.

I figured that'd make it perfect for an audiobook, since it would be like listening to the original monologue. But it doesn't really work. The first chapter break ruins that illusion, since people who have decided to narrate their life stories shortly before their deaths generally don't bother to sort it out into thematically appropriate chapters. Also, considering that the guy knows he only has a few hours (though he can't be sure how many) left to live, you'd think he'd choose somewhat more important things to talk about than how to cook a friggin' lobster.

So far, I'm only into the second chapter, but if it doesn't get any better I'll probably be giving up on Palahniuk after this year. Maybe I'm just too old for his brand of fiction, but I've noticed the last few of his works I've read have struck me as emotionally fraudulent.

Not that this novel hasn't had its moments. There was a brief description about providing food and beverages to the passengers on the plane he hijacks, and also about the quandary of being unable to use a restroom because you have to keep a weapon trained on your hostages. But some of the other stuff, such as his reaction to people who dial him instead of the suicide hotline with the similar phone number, just fall flat. It's not even that I'm appalled, which would at least be a reaction. Anyway, I'll reserve further judgement until I get deeper into the novel.

Carlos,
Fevre Dream was my first foray into GRRM as well. Do you plan on reading any more of his works?

Victoria, I don't have any more that I'm planning to read, but I'm sure I'll find my way to his other works at some point. I'm actually tempted to start his Song of Ice and Fire saga despite the fact that I'm not a big fan of epic fantasy.

A quick note on Survivor: aside from the fact that it flubs its basic premise, it's not bad. Palahniuk's novels always have their moments, although they don't always hold together as novels.

Carlos, thanks for your thoughts on Fevre Dream. Now I know it's not a wasted entry on my wishlist. Don't know when I'll get to it though as there's just so much other stuff out there already.

Wolfy, I think an overstuffed TBR list is a common malady among LTers. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I woke up one day and found that there weren't any books I was interested in reading, either in my collection or outside it. Would I feel a sense of terror or relief?

Another note on Survivor: I'm starting to enjoy it. I'm not sure why I didn't get this before, but he's intentionally cartoonish. The rich people in a Palahniuk novel are no more representative of rich people in the real world than terrorists in a Bruce Willis movie are representative of real world terrorists. The social elements that Palahniuk is satirizing are intentionally exaggerated to the point of absurdity.

It didn't really hit me until the part in the book where the protagonist becomes a huge spiritual because he's the last surviving member of a mass suicide. In the real world, most people probably couldn't name you one survivor a cult suicide. That's the point, though. The events described would never happen in the real world, but they're there to satirize celebrity spiritual leaders.

This actually helps resolve one of my complaints with Haunted, which is that the motivations of the main characters don't make any sense. In the real world, they wouldn't, but they're exaggerated versions of how people act.

Just to add on briefly to what I said about George R. R. Martin: After looking through bibliography, I'll have to add The Armageddon Rag, which has elements of horror, to my wishlist. I think Martin really has a way with horror elements. I was really impressed by some of his short horror stories in Dreamsongs 2. "The Monkey Treatment" and "The Pear-Shaped Man" both had this odd, almost sexual, undercurrent that made them really get under my skin. My favorite of that collection was easily "Sandkings," a sort of sci-fi horror story with a wicked ironic ending.

Book Started: The Watchers Out of Time
Category: What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
Potential Crossover Categories: Short Story Collections, Weird Tales, It Came from the Bookshelf!

August Derleth is an interesting, arguably controversial figure in Lovecraft posthumous career. One the plus side, he idolized HPL so much that he (along with Donald Wandrei) founded Arkham House in order to make sure Lovecraft's stuff would see publication beyond the pulps. More controversial was his theorizing about the "Cthulhu Mythos" in which he claimed that the common thematic element in Lovecraft's stories was the struggle between the good Elder Gods and the evil Old Ones.

Then there's the "posthumous collaborations," such as The Watchers Out of Time (short story collection) and The Lurker at the Threshold (novella). These stories are based on fragments or even just story ideas that Lovecraft left behind after his death. Derleth then wrote stories around those fragments/ideas and presented them as collaborations between himself and HPL.

I've encountered Derleth's work in previous Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, and as I mentioned with The Azathoth Cycle I went through a phase of reading then becoming bored with this type of fiction. It is nice to approach it now having accepted that it rarely matches Lovecraft's original works but can be fun in its own right.

So far, I've only read the first story, "The Survivor," about a man who rents a house that was previously owned by a strange doctor. It's actually a pretty good story, and though Derleth can be a little too literal in his use of the Mythos elements, there's some clever choices here where he mixes references to Lovecraft stories such as "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" with elements derived from other sources.

12. Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk - finished 3/11/10

As much as I may have ragged on this early on, it actually ended up being mostly enjoyable. I feel sort of as I did Choke, that I have a somewhat better sense of what Palahniuk is doing and what he's going for. (Except that I didn't really care for Choke.) I do feel a little like a doofus because it did not occur to me until this novel that all of the fact dumps in a Palahniuk novel are not to give the narrator veracity. They are more like the cetology chapters in Moby Dick, meant to add texture and thematic depth.

That said, it was not a complete success. There's something about the "everything is the same" ennui and "embrace a new exciting life" rhetoric of this novel that seemed like it would have been really resonant when I was much younger. Tender Branson goes from being a housekeeper in rich people's houses to being an international celebrity yet still feels that life is dull. The remedy for that seems to be a complete break with the past, a sloughing off of old identity to a new brighter self. A stark choice between being a completely stagnant human being or radically breaking with the past doesn't strike me as all that realistic or constructive a choice, but it is the kind of thing that I can see would appeal to the teenager who feels he does not have his own identity yet. But life is more about making connections than breaking them. Palahniuk never says making connections isn't important, but it's at best subtext.

And I still feel a little let down at how Palahniuk flubs the narrative. It just seems sort of lazy. When Tender Branson is going on about how he was taught gardening, housecleaning and etiquette in the church colony, I was sort of hoping it would turn out he had studied Spanbauerian minimalism as well. But I don't know if Palahniuk has a sense of humor about his own writing.

Book Started: Raucho
Category: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan
Possible overlap categories: None

Last year, I read Güiraldes' best known work Don Segundo Sombra, about an Argentine boy whose saved from a potential life of dissipation through his friendship with an older gaucho. It was a pretty good novel, sweet in its nostalgic look at the last days of the gauchos.

There was some amount of autobiography in that novel, but this one, which he wrote earlier in his life, is apparently very autobiographical. It concerns a boy, nicknamed Raucho, who lives on an estancia with his siblings and their widowed father. Güiraldes' style has a nice way of capturing the ambiance of the place.

Book Started: Three Hainish Novels
Category: A Series Subject
Possible Overlap Categories: None

Aka Worlds of Exile and Illusion, this volume collects three of Ursula K. Le Guin's earliest sci-fi novels, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. So far, I'm just a little ways into the first of the three novels. It doesn't have quite the same degree of heady social metaphor as The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, but it's still pretty good. It's impossibly beautiful aliens who ride winged steeds does border a little on cheesy fantasy, but Le Guin so far attempts to balance that out with the more rational interplanetary anthropologist Rocannon.

13. The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth - finished 3/17/10

Considering my previous impressions of Derlth's work, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. There are some pretty good stories here, especially when Derleth doesn't try so hard to make them Lovecraftian.

As I mentioned above, these stories were based off of fragments or story ideas that Derleth had turned up in Lovecraft's notes. It comes off as really strange though when a story so closely apes a Lovecraft original, as if Derleth had taken the preliminary notes for a completed story and written his own story off the same notes. Derleth is at his most Pierre Menard with "The Shadow Out of Space" which, as the name indicates, is just "The Shadow Out of Time." Also noteworthy is "The Peabody Heritage" which is really just "The Dreams in the Witch House" plus "The Rats in the Walls."

Admittedly, sometimes there's an interesting spin. "The Lamp of Alhazred" is "The Silver Key," but with a heavy dose of mythologizing of Lovecraft himself. The best stories are easily "The Survivor," "The Shuttered Room," "The Shadow in the Attic," and "The Fisherman of Falcon Point." Though these all borrow heavily from Lovecraft, they are willing to take those borrowed elements in interesting directions.

Damn, that's an ugly cover....!

Sorry, not nearly fluent enough in Lovecraftian to really get the review. But I really like how you always manage to write complex and thought-through reviews in just a few lines. I enjoy this thread a lot!

Thanks. Sometimes I wonder, since I go down rabbit holes such as Lovecraftian reads or pondering which of the Brontës' works count as Gothic, so it's good to hear the things I write still manage to be interesting.

As for The Watchers Out of Time, books of horror often have some really cheesy covers. You have to wonder what the creative process was like.

"Well, 'Time' is in the title so we should put some kind of clock on there. Also, 'Watchers' so maybe we should put some eyes."

"I don't know, eyes aren't really that scary. How about a skull with eyes?"

"Yeah, that's better, and how about fangs? Fanged skulls are always scary!"

"And then, we'll have a snake coming out of the skull's mouth!"

"Why, what does a snake have to with it?"

"It doesn't matter. It's scary, isn't it? Do you have a better idea?"

"Well... no, not really."

"Right, a snake it is."

You do bring up a good point, and one I was thinking about, which is that I don't really get into much detail about the stories. My commentary sort of assumes the reader knows what all those Lovecraftian references mean, which might apply to a good chunk of people who would be interested in the book but not everyone.

The Watchers Out of Time Part II

First, I should admit there's certain stories I can't look at objectively, because they appear to simply copy Lovecraft. "The Shadow Out of Space" may or may not be a good story, but since it copies "The Shadow Out of Time" so closely while adding almost nothing new, it comes off as a pale imitation. I have a similar problem with "The Peabody Heritage," which takes many of the elements of "The Rats in the Walls" (man moves into ancestral home, which is whispered darkly about by the locals, and tries to renovate it only to find something unpleasant in his ancestry) and combines them with elements of "The Dreams in the Witch House" (man moves into house with strange geometry, has dreams about sinister figure and its familiar).

There were also some stories that I found enjoyable because of the Lovecraftian content, such as the way "The Lamp of Alhazred" mythogizes HPL's writing career. Would it be enjoyable to the reader not familiar with Lovecraft? It's hard to say.

Those are really the worst offenders, and the rest have varying degrees of originality. Derleth does have a couple of bad habits that made me think the stories would have benefited from a little editing. For the first half of the stories, he relies a lot on the italicized terminal climax. (That is, the final shocking bit of information is left until the very end and then punctuated through the use of italics.) It's a somewhat crude technique, a bit like playing a really loud scare chord while displaying a crucial bit of information. When done well it can be effective, but in some of these stories italicize one or two paragraphs, which just comes off as cheesy. The later stories thankfully drop this technique.

The other big weakness is the recycling of plots, especially the "man moves into a house he's inherited only to find himself threatened by something evil and secret left by his ancestor" plot, which is used in slightly less than half of the stories. I won't comment on all of the stories, but I will single out five I found very enjoyable as examples of the best of the collection.

The Survivor - A man rents a house that was previously owned by an eccentric old doctor. The lawyer he rents it from mentions the house is in a sort of limbo until an unnamed heir shows up. As the man settles in, he finds the old doctor's notes, which reveal a strange fascination with reptiles and life extension. Soon, he starts to hear weird sounds in the night. A nice mix of supernatural and science fiction elements.

The Ancestor - The narrator's childhood friend requests his presence in helping him with some research. When the narrator arrives, the friend reveals he has made some astonishing discoveries into the nature of memory, though at the cost of his own health. As the research progresses, the friend worsens. There's a fair amount of Poe and Machen, but it feels more like homage than theft. Marred only by the italicized and too vague ending.

The Shadow in the Attic - This is easily the best of the "man inherits house from evil ancestor" stories. The house in question has a strange dark splotch on one of the attic walls, which looks astonishingly like a person. The heir soon begins to feel that the house wants something from him, then strange noises and sights begin to trouble his sleep. There's a great sense of mystery as well as some nice descriptive passages. Additionally, the house begins to have an effect on the heir's relationship with his fiancé, which provides an additional dynamic and sets up an eerie yet amusing ending.

The Dark Brotherhood - A young man and his (Platonic?) female friend share a passion for walking the streets of the city at night. One night they meet up with a curious fellow who resembles Edgar Allan Poe. This one eventually takes an interesting science-fiction turn, where it gets wild and surreal but in a good way.

The Fisherman of Falcon Point - There's almost a sense of myth to this tale of an old fisherman who spares the life of a rather peculiar mermaid who ends up in his nets one night. Not really scary, but a definite uncanny sadness to it.

Why do I suddenly feel as if I've spent far more time describing the fiction of August Derleth than any reasonable person should?

14. Raucho by Ricardo Güiraldes - finished 3/20/10

Raucho is a very short work, probably closer to a novella than a full novel. It tells the story of Raucho, who grows up on an estancia with his siblings and widowed father. He gets to know the life of rural Argentina, but as he reaches adulthood, he decides to seek out a more cosmopolitan life. He eventually finds himself in Paris, where he is drawn to a life of partying, sex, drug use and general dissipation. Eventually, he bottoms out and returns to Argentina.

I have to admit that there isn't much to the book structurally. The writing is lovely, especially Güiraldes' description of rural Argentina and the various characters who populate it. An enjoyable work, but not really as good as Don Segundo Sombra, which is probably justified in being Güiraldes' best known work.

a. Rocannon's World (from Three Hainish Novels) by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin's first entry into what would eventually become the Hainish Cycle already features some of the anthropological/sociological themes that distinguish Le Guin's science fiction. Generally, though, the story plays much closer to straight sci fi.

The anthropologist Rocannon finds himself stranded on an alien planet when an attack destroys the ship that had brought him along with all of his colleagues. Though cut off from the rest of his kind, he has some history with the residents of the planet, especially one aristocratic race. He drafts some allies and begins a long, perilous journey to the enemy encampment to find a way to contact the nearest colonized planet, which lies eight light-years away. The journey takes up the bulk of the narrative, as Rocannon and his allies confront various peoples, some of whom are decidedly unfriendly.

As per Le Guin's general approach, the themes of language, society and myth feature substantially into the novel. They're not really a focus of the story, but they do provide an underpinning and help flesh out relationships, especially between Rocannon and Mogien, the haughty warrior who is descended from a woman Rocannon had helped many years back. Though a science fiction tale, Rocannon's World has the epic feel of a traditional hero's journey and a modern novelistic emphasis on the relation between plausible characters.

Book Started: Los almuerzos

This is the only other Evelio Rosero book that my local library has, and is quite short so I decided to spend a little time with this Colombian author. I started the book on Monday, which happened to be a day I did much travelling. I found I couldn't get into it, though I attribute that to all of the distractions and stresses of boarding airplanes, passing security, schedules, etc. However, the story about a hunchback who lives and works at a church where he serves the free lunches that the church offers looks quite intriguing. Instead, I decided to go with...

Book Started: Aguafuertes Porteñas

To me the ideal airport book is a humorous essay collection. The humor helps to take some of the edge off the travelling experience, while the brevity of essays matches that sense of ADD produced by the "hurry up then wait" nature of air travel. I know there are "airport novels," but most of those are thrillers. Despite my foray into those last year while looking for Templar books, I have to admit thrillers are just not a genre I generally feel tempted by.

Aguafuertes Porteñas (or Etchings from Buenos Aires) is a collection of columns that Roberto Arlt wrote for the daily "El Mundo," in which he cast his perceptive, oft sardonic eye on contemporary Argentine culture, language and social mores. The observations are over 70 years old, but still make for a fascinating look into the porteño spirit. They are also often quite funny. I managed to get through about half of the essays in my time at the airport and hope to finish the entire book shortly.

15. Los almuerzos by Evelio Rosero - finished 3/29/10

Los almuerzos (The Lunches) takes place in a Catholic Church in Bogota. The hunchback Tancredo has grown up in the church, and among his tasks is serving the daily lunches that the church serves to the needy. It's a task he dislikes, particularly on Thursday when the elderly come, and the violent feelings it provokes in him often disturb him. He is carrying out a secret relationship with Sabina, another orphan who has been taken in by the church. Along with the priest and the sacristan, the final three residents of the home are three women who lost their husbands and children to a militia. They are called the three Lilias and seem curiously interconnected.

As with Los ejercitos, Rosero begins what with what appears to be a picaresque setting and then lets it gradually slip into darkness until the whole thing takes on the aspect of a nightmare or horror story. Ejercitos is a little clearer in its allegory to contemporary Colombian society, but I wonder if like his (ex-)fellow Colombian Fernando Vallejo, Rosero sees the church in Colombia as generally harmful.

A few brief thoughts on Moby Dick, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Gothic novels:

I realized today that Moby Dick is to a large extent a Gothic novel. (Hey, added overlap category!) It's not straight Gothic in the same way The Mysteries of Udolpho or Carmilla. It's more like Wuthering Heights, in that the Gothic tradition is part of its DNA, and while it isn't necessary to know that in order to enjoy it, it does add another level to it.

I'm a third of the way into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I actually had to restart it, since I made the mistake of trying to read it right after Jane Eyre, which was a bad idea. (A little bit akin to following up We Have Always Lived in the Castle with Duma Key or Mervyn Peake with Fritz Leiber.) At this point, I'm not really sure how Gothic Wildfell Hall is, but beyond that, I am starting to worry about this novel.

(SPOILER WARNINGS) I'm into Helen Graham's journal where she describes meeting and falling in love with Arthur Huntington. Though I know very little about the novel, I know enough to suspect this is a very bad thing. However, and this may be my own fault for expecting something Gothic, but as the source of all trouble in Helen's life, Huntington just won't do. He's just, well, a frat boy! And this journal is starting to take on the vague shape of a Lifetime Movie. I'm hoping I'm wrong and it'll get better, because this would sadly be the first time tone of the Brontë sisters has let me down.(END SPOILERS)

16. Aguafuertes Porteñas by Roberto Arlt - finished 3/30/10
17. Cuentos Completos by Roberto Arlt - finished 3/31/10

Wow, well, Cuentos took me a while to complete (as it's 820 pages long and in Spanish) but it was worth it. It appears that only two collections of Arlt's short fiction were published during his lifetime: El jorobadito and El criador de gorilas. Together, those two collections appear to have constituted only a third of the stories Arlt wrote in his lifetime. So, it's pretty clear why a work like this is something of a treat. It's especially interesting to see how the focus of Arlt's shifts. His early work is much like that in El jorobadito about the hypocrisies and foibles of contemporary Argentine society.

This is also the realm of Aguafuertes Porteñas, though from a somewhat different perspective. The short stories are somewhat harsh, sort of tragic. The protagonists seem to find little option but to reject society, often symbolized by running away from a potential marriage. The essays of Agufuertes, on the other hand, tend to be humorous if sometimes sardonic. I especially like the language of the Aguafuertes, which reflects the particular Buenos Aires way of speaking. (I felt I could sometimes "hear" the various characters that show up in these pieces.) There were definitely lines I was tempted to write down because of their humor or insight.

Arlt's focus changes with the later stories, though certain themes persist. A trip to North Africa inspires a bunch of Orientalist stories, some collected in El criador de gorilas. These are often interesting stories, with a similar sense of Arltian desperation, though without the brilliantly captured milieu. In the afterword, David Viñas criticizes those stories for relying too much on cliché. While there is some truth to that, I think there are some very good stories in that bunch.

Arlt was influenced by Dostoevsky, which shows more strongly in the early stories. Some of the later stories read as more like Poe, dealing with terrible revenges, detectives solving impossible crimes, science fiction themes, and even a story about a ship caught in a maelstrom which strongly recalls Poe's "M.S. Found in a Bottle."

Overall, a magnificent journey through Arlt's short fiction, which sometimes strange or cruel, but never dull.

Book Started: Horacio Quiroga - Cuentos Vol. I
Category: Short Story Collections
Possible overlap categories: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan, A Series Subject

Horacio Quiroga is considered one of the fathers of Latin American literature. Though born in Uruguay, Quiroga lived a good part of his life in Argentina and set many of his stories there. Though influenced by Poe (some of his stories could be considered horror stories), a good part of Quiroga's stories are set in contemporary Argentine life.

Book Started: The Hungry Moon
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!

I grabbed this to have something light to fall back on when I get tired of Moby Dick, but so far I've only made it a few chapters in. Turns out when I get tired of Moby Dick, I'm just tired of reading. I have had good experiences with Ramsey Campbell before so I'm hopeful.

b. Planet of Exile (from Three Hainish Novels) by Ursula K. Le Guin

As with Rocannon's World, the basic premise is of members of an international empire left stranded on a relatively undeveloped planet when war breaks out. This time, though, it's not one man but a colony. The isolation is not for several years but for multiple generations. The planet they find themselves on has very long years, so that a person may only live through three seasons. The colonists reach an uneasy peace with the locals, who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle. When war threatens, the relationship between the two groups is tested. Shorter than Rocannon's World, perhaps a little less moving.

18. Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville - finished 4/8/10

As I mentioned when I started reading it, I'd previously managed to make it through Moby Dick only as an audiobook. Though it was certainly a good way to get comfortable with the book, and I was glad to have had that experience when I read the book. Actually reading the book is a substantially more challenging and also more rewarding experience than listening to it, mostly because audiobooks allow one a certain degree of passivity as compared to text. Still, I was glad to have some appreciation of Melville before tackling his language and frequent digressions.

When you're really grappling with a text, sometimes it manages to get under your skin. I remember one night after a long day of work, reading the chapter on whiteness. I was struck by how brilliant the whole idea seemed, because whiteness seemed to suggest blankness but also opacity. And this seemed to get at one of the fascinating ambiguities of the novel, which is to what extent is Moby Dick a consciously destructive force. Does that great opacity hide a devious nature, or is it just Ahab's projection onto a blank page? That night, as I was falling asleep, the thought ocurred to me that Moby Dick might be God, and when I woke up the next day, I saw Moby Dick's whiteness as the obverse of the jaguar's spots in Borges' "The Writing of the God." That is, the surface from the whale carried a message from God, and that message was, "I have nothing to say to you, no interest in communicating with you." I'm not sure if it's what Melville was going for, but it's the sort of thought that crops up when a piece of fiction really gets your synapses going.

One thing that I got out of this reading that I didn't get out of the previous one are the Gothic elements in Moby Dick, which I think I touched on briefly above. Central to this is the character of Ahab himself, whose brooding nature and fixation with revenge reminded me of Poe. There's a poignant moment shortly before the final hunt when he becomes aware of the complete waste that has been his quest for revenge, yet he decides that he must see to completion what he has started.

This is the first of my re-reads, and I guess I should address the obvious question: Was it worth revisiting? Oh, yeah, without a doubt.


19. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë - finished 4/9/10

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall presents a scathing attack on Victorian mores and 19th Century views on gender, so if you, dear reader, still cling to your Victorian mores and 19th Century gender views, this book will totally blow your mind!

Please excuse my sarcasm. It's a defense mechanism based on the fact that I feel some anxiety over not liking this book more. After all, it deals with important issues, it was daring for its time, it has realistic characters, it features a very heroic portrayal of a woman, it generally avoids histrionics, it's well written, but, well, I just didn't find it that engaging. And after greatly enjoying Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I was hoping this would be somewhere on the same level.

To get into what I found disappointing, I'm going to have to get into spoilers, so skip ahead to Three Hainish Novels if you want to remain ignorant of the plot twists.

The Tenant of the title is Helen Graham, a widow who moves into an old abandoned manor with her young son. The narrator, Gilbert Markham, gets to know her and eventually falls in love with her. Helen warns him that their relationship cannot move beyond friendship and reveals that she is still married, having left her husband for being unfaithful, abusive and an alcoholic. She then learns that her husband has been griveously injured and returns to minister to him. Despite her ministrations, his drunkeness leads to his death. Gilbert later seeks out Helen, and they get married.

Though the characters were largely realistic, I found them sort of flat. Let's start with Arthur Huntington, Helen's profligate husband, who plays the part of Gothic villain here. We first meet him through Helen's diary, where she describes how he courts her. The novel never really convinces me that Helen is particularly in love with him. He just seems like a handsome guy who is more interesting than her middle-aged suitors. Worse than that, he comes off as a little bit of a frat boy. There was something about his portrayal that made me think that 150 years later, this character is too familiar, the husband from a hundred Lifetime movies who by the end of the first act has been revealed to be less perfect than he initially seemed.

Helen is pious, considerate and earnest, which makes her the sort of character that's easy to respect. She comes off as sort of bloodless, though, a plaster saint. It almost seemed like in trying to make the character unimpeachable, Anne Brontë strips from her much of her potentially complex humanity.

As for Gilbert, well, there's not really much to him. There's no sense of an unreliable narrator, as with either of the narrators of Wuthering Heights. And as with the Arthur-Helen courtship, I never felt any sort of emotional investment in their eventual union. Was it nice that see that they got their happy ending? Yes, but it pales in comparison to the end of Jane Eyre, which had me seriously tearing up.

In brewing, a beer brewed to extremes (big, bitter or sour) generally keeps longer than one made along milder lines. So with the Brontës. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights more fully embrace their Gothic roots, and what results are novels that still retain much of their power over a century and a half later. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tries to be more measured and serious, but what results was "truly daring for its time," a time which has already passed. The issues it raises are important and the book is well-written, but it lacks the visceral punch of trluy classic fiction.


20. Three Hainish Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin - finished 4/9/10

This volume concludes with City of Illusions, a novel set in the aftermath of the galactic war hinted at in Planet of Exile. A mysterious stranger with cat-like eyes walks out of the woods one day and into a little village. He has no memory, no ability to speak, the motor control of a newborn baby. With the help of the villagers, he regains speech and mobility, but his memory is still a complete blank. He undertakes a juorney to the grand city in which the rulers of the planet live. There he finds himself caught up in a dangerous game of identity, illusion and memory.

Overall, it's a pretty solid collection. I've been generally lukewarm in my praise, perhaps because compared to Le Guin's later, more philosophical novels, these are just strongly written science fiction stories. Even these, though, seem to have a subtext of destabilizing colonial narratives. But now I risk getting into pretention...

21. La virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo - finished 4/13/10

A man returns to his hometown of Medellin, Colombia. He's middle-aged, homosexual, and fed up with life. He talks about returning to die, though it's not clear if his end is imminent or this only an expression of his world-weariness. This being Medellin, there is death to spare. Shortly after his arrival, he gets romantically involved with Alexis, a teenage boy who is the last of a gang of assassins who worked for a fallen cartel. The narrator's misanthropy and the boy's talent for killing make for a sinister combination, as Alexis enforces the harsh judgment that the narrator previously only expressed verbally.

The narrator--named Fernando, though that name is said only once--even begins to refer to Alexis as his Angel of Death. Alexis' signature appears to be shooting his victims in the center of the forehead, right where the Ash Wednesday cross would appear, a detail that connects the novel to the assassination of Colonel Buendia's sons in Cien años de soledad. Vallejo's prose has a certain delirious quality, which gives the novel a surreal edge.

La virgen de los sicarios was adapted into a movie, which I'd already seen. The two are very similar, though the movie has a more realistic tone.


22. Los gauchos judios by Alberto Gerchunoff - finished 4/16/10

The short stories in this collection are based largely on Gerchunoff's own childhood. His family was part of a migration of Russian Jews to Argentina where they settled mainly in the provinces of Santa Fe, Entre Rios, and Buenos Aires. Apparently, the Argentine countryside was seen as something of a promised land. (Not that surprising when you consider they were fleeing Tsarist Russia.)

There's an interesting degree of cultural interaction between the immigrants and the criollo residents. Not so much antisemitic or xenophobia, but something more subtle. The old gauchos tend to respect the serious and hardworking newcomers, while the younger of the arrivals often become fascinated with the rugged gauchos. A few of the young women run off with local men, while some of the boys take to dressing like gauchos and emulating their lifestyle.

Los gauchos judios was written at a time when the gaucho was taking on a sort of mythic role in Argentine culture. In the 19th century, he had been largely a representative of the rural life, with its ignorance and poverty. With the modernization of Argentina, he came to be romanticized, representing something like the soul of the nation. I don't know to what extent Gerchunoff consciously thought to tie his own community's experience to the rising gaucho myth, but the impression here is of an argument that whatever exotic traditions they brought with them, the sons and daughters of those Russian immigrants considered themselves fully Argentine.

Book Started: Lovecraft Unbound
Category: What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
Possible Overlap Categories: It Came from the Bookshelf!, Weird Tales

Ellen Datlow has collected here 20 different Lovecraftian stories from a variety of contemporary writers. In the introduction, she states that she was looking for stories that suggested or touched on some element of Lovecraftian fiction without descending into pastiche.

The first story "The Crevasse" feels like it matches that criteria perfectly. When an arctic expedition goes wrong, a small band of men find themselves racing back to base camp. Along the way, they stumble across a deep crack in the ice. When one of the explorers descends into the crevasse on a mission of mercy, he discovers hints of the unthinkable.

The second story "The Office of Doom" doesn't work as well. This story started out interestingly enough, with a retiring protagonist cleaning out an unused library office that had gained a nickname from it's role as last stop for academics on their way out the door. Then it takes a turn into the sort of story where Necronomicons are real and whose deleterious effects must be combated with occult knowledge. This sort of postmodern, tongue-in-cheek take is sort of hard to pull off. The story is mildly amusing as a satire on campus politics, though.

Book Started: Wuthering Heights
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
Possible Overlap Categories: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

Having visited with Charlotte and Anne, I figured it was time to return to Emily. I think it took me a little while to get into it the last time I read it, because there's much about the beginning that I've completely forgotten. That said, it starts off quite good, though in ways that might be considered frustrating.

After all, what the hell is up with Lockwood? What's the story with his flirtation, why does he share that? And what's up with that odd dream, which sends the novel deep into Gothic territory? The Lockwood-Heathcliff relationship also reminds me a bit of the Ismael-Ahab relationship, where our narrator seems to hint at an odd form of kinship with the brooding figure who lurks through his narration.

It's only been two years since I last read Wuthering Heights, but I'm already glad to be back.

23. The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell - finished 4/19/10

This is the first of two books I recently finished set in the moors of the English countryside. The Hungry Moon is set in the village of Moonwell, whose most unique feature lies on the moors just outside of town. It is a sort of well or shaft that descends into the ground, rumored to be ancient and ringed by a short wall. Every year, the locals send an effigy of flowers down into it for St. John's day, though the sacrifice clearly has pagan roots.

Things change when an American evangelist with roots to Moonwell shows up. He has made it his goal to end the pagan practice and exorcise whatever demon or spirit lives within. First, his oratory brings most of the town under his influence, rendering life uncomfortable for the few skeptics left. The evangelist gets his confrontation, but things only get stranger after that, so the remaining skeptics have to take matters into their own hands.

Overall, a pretty good read, though not particularly scary. Campbell has a talent for visuals, put to good use here to create a sense of eeriness, but it never manages to get into that real pulse-pounding territory. There's a couple of big chunks of exposition--one early in the novel and one late--which sort of grind the action to a halt. Additionally, the supernatural threat sometimes feels a little overcooked, an odd mix of elements that never really cement. Judging just by The Hungry Moon, I'd have to say I probably prefer Campbell's short stories, though I'm still interested in reading his other novels.

a. Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte by Horacio Quiroga (from Horacio Quiroga - Cuentos Vol. I)

Speaking of horror, short stories and harsh environments--I confess that the most compelling of Quiroga's stories in this collection are those with an element of either horror (The Feather Pillow), the harshness of rural Argentina & Uruguay (Los Mensu) or with elements of both (The Wild Honey). Quiroga was apparently a big reader of Poe and heavily influenced by the latter's work. His ability to wring a sense of terror from straightforward descriptions of harsh reality tied to everyday country life remind me a bit of Maupassant.

Most of these stories have elements of harsh reality, such as the consequences of drug use, and I believe there is only one (almost ironic) happy ending, that of "Meningitis and its Shadow." I confess my favorite stories are probably "The Feather Pillow," grim, eerie and short, and "Los Mensu" (not sure how to translate the title) which is sadly realistic.


24. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë - finished 4/24/10

I was struck by several things on my re-read of Wuthering Heights. Chief among them is the fact that of all the novels I've read from the sisters Brontë, this one is written as if to be the hardest to enjoy. Jane Eyre has a very likable narrator/protagonist and ends on a note which may as well be "...and they all lived happily ever after." The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's characters aren't quite as likable, but all the good guys end well and the bad guys poorly, so one can feel some gratification in that. WH doesn't even seem to have good guys, only different degrees of unpleasant people. WH also gives us the narrative from two different narrators, as if to distance us from the action; duplicates names to make things more confusing; and fills the novel with unhappy deaths.

My second thought is that a novel with all these challenges manages to be so compelling has got to be a testament to Emily's brilliance. Chief of Emily's strengths is her ability to capture character voices, the sort of achievement where you feel you could pick out a character just from the way they speak, or as with Isabella before and after her marriage to Heathcliff, you get a real sense of what's going on in their head.

When I had previously read WH, it was mostly in the context of Gothic novels such as The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho, and it's clear that those older Gothics are important part of this novels DNA. What's impressive is how well the novel captures that sense of Gothic gloominess, moral peril, isolation, etc. without resorting to anything resembling Gothic histrionics. There's no overly flowery descriptions of landscape or much in the way of swooning or people going on about how terrified they are, yet the bleak wildness of the moors, the imposing greyness of Wuthering Heights, and the struggle of its characters gives much the same sense.

As before, I was impressed by Heathcliff as a character. He's a downright monster, and it's easy to pathologize his relationship with Catherine. Yet, I always find I can't really root against the guy. There's something about the way he expresses himself, his combination of defiance and pathos. He's like the perfect Byronic hero, some Dark God of Romance reminding us that love doesn't just sometimes hurt but can shake us to the core.

Heathcliff is the most dramatic characters, but I found pretty much all of them interesting. None were exactly easy to like, yet they all had their humanity, and they were all largely victims of Heathcliff. That ambiguity of portrayal is probably one of the reasons this is considered a classic, a designation it richly deserves!

@88 That's it. I'm re-reading Wuthering Heights next year.

#89 - It's a difficult book to read, not because of the style, but because the characters can be so frustrating. There's not really anyone to root for, mostly just various degrees of bad behavior. I may just have a preference for moral ambiguity, but I rather liked that sort of complexity. We've all known people in real life who inspired as much frustration as sympathy.

And in the midst of all these normal, flawed people, there's Heathcliff. It's funny, he's not a vampire, he hasn't sold his soul to the devil, but he makes me feel a little bit sorry for all the other characters, as if just being in the same story as he is puts them in danger. It's some of that Gothic mystique that Emily manages to evoke so effectively yet understatedly.

You had me at post 87, Carlos ;-).

Also, a big thank you for being one of the ones that made me read We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Finished it yesterday and utterly loved it.

There's not really anyone to root for, mostly just various degrees of bad behavior.

That is so true!

#91 - Oops, guess I got a little carried away there...

Also--and this is completely gratuitous--Wuthering Heights in Semaphore!

Glad you liked We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Liked your review.

Oops, a little behind on the books I've started.

Book Started: A Game of Thrones
Category: A Series Subject

This category was originally just for series I had only read one or two entries of, so that I could get around to finishing. Not sure if I had enough of those. Also, an excuse to pick up books that otherwise wouldn't fit into any other category.

I'm usually wary of epic fantasy, but this is quite good.

Book Started: Harvest Home
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!
Possible overlaps: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

I thought Tryon's The Other was quite good. This is his other well-regarded horror work, also set in rural New England. A couple and their daughter move from New York to the countryside, where the locals seem nice if perhaps a bit odd. Get the sense of some thematic overlap with The Wicker Man and Diary.

Book Started: Books of Blood vol 2
Category: A Series Subject
Possible overlaps: It Came from the Bookshelf!, Short Story Collections, Weird Tales

The second entry in Clive Barker's horror debut. Barker's got an interesting warped sense, especially when it comes to body horror. Sometimes deliciously over the top.

@Books of blood - I've only ever read the short story included in the VanderMeers' New Weird collection. But that left an impression. Do the parts in any way benefit form being read in order? (I know they are short stories, but they could still carry some sort of thematic arc, reaccurring characters, or something of that ilk).

...he's not a vampire, he hasn't sold his soul to the devil, but he makes me feel a little bit sorry for all the other characters, as if just being in the same story as he is puts them in danger.

Carlos - I've really enjoyed your analysis of Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff. I read this a couple of years ago, it was probably a reread, but I now appreciate the book far more after your comments.
I read and enjoyed We have always lived in the castle last year after you reviewed it on your 999 thread. If you ever come across The Scarecrow or Predicament by Ronald Hugh Morrieson I think you would enjoy - he's the only writer in the genre of Taranaki Gothic.

#95 - I think the division into separate books was just as a way to break them up, because I haven't gotten much of a sense of progression. Not much of a thematic link, though the first of the stories serves as a little bit of a framing story.

#96 - I'd never heard of Morrieson before, but I'll have to keep him in mind. What's Taranaki Gothic?

Book Started: Halloween: New Poems
Category: Poetry & Prose

A bit of an odds & ends category. I was thinking of trying to read some poetry this year, since it's sort of a blind spot. Receiving Halloween: New Poems as an ER book made me decide to go ahead with it, since that way I'd be able to claim it on here. Sort of a mixed bag so far. The poems are mostly meant to be fun, sometimes a little spooky, sometimes wistful or nostalgic. Some aren't that great, either in conception or execution.

25. Books of Blood Vol. 2 by Clive Barker - finished 4/30/10

Barker originally broke into publishing with the Books of Blood, which are either 3 volumes or 6. I don't know the publishing history or why books 4 through 6 should or shouldn't be included. These early stories tend to be quite dark, and due to his fondness for body horror, quite gruesome to boot. Barker's approach isn't particularly sophisticated, but it is effective.

The collection kicks off with "Dread," which has little gore and nothing supernatural but the psychological nastiness was pretty unsettling. "Hell's Event" is the story of a footrace in London, which will decide if parliament will stay in session or be replaced by a legion of howling, ravenous demons (insert joke about Congress). I found it darkly amusing. "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament" and "The Skins of the Fathers" are both Barker pushing the body horror to its full extent. In the first, a woman learns she is capable of manipulating flesh with her mind, often to very horrific result. (She kills her husband by turning him into a briefcase.) The story goes into some odd territory but generally works. "Skins" concerns a group of bizarre creatures, like something out of Tim Burton's nightmares who are distantly related to mankind and able to interbreed. A confrontation with some townspeople in the desert leads to very messy results.

The only story I didn't care for was "The New Murders in the Rue Morgue." I just found it too ridiculous. Of course, the same could be said for the other stories, but they all manage to be entertaining. The story stumbles early on when the narrator introduces himself as the grandson of the real Agustue Dupin, the detective of Poe's original "Murders in the Rue Morgue." Perhaps it's just all the Lovecraftian pastiches I've read, but the "horror story turns out to have been based on true story" trope just strikes me as sort of tired. Overall, the story strikes me as a misfire. Except for that one, though, the book is pretty good overall.

b. Cuentos de la Selva by Horacio Quiroga - finished 4/29/10

This is quite different from the previous section, since these were meant to be children's stories. I'd actually heard one of these stories before, about why flamingos have pink legs, which suggests it might have its origins in folklore. Mostly amusing, sometimes strange. (One has a turtle save a man by loading him on her back and walking to Buenos Aires.)


26 Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon - finished 5/4/10

Thomas Tryon retired from acting to write novels, producing (among other works), two novels of terror in rural New England. The Other was a nicely paced tale of doppelgangers and bad seeds, full of moments where you realized what was about to happen only a heartbeat before you read about it. Harvest Home has a slower pace to it, building up to a big reveal.

Ned and Beth Constantine decide to move out of the city. They discover a pleasant rural community, where people still live very traditional lives. They are enchanted by the place and find themselves generally welcomed. Over time, Ned becomes aware of some disquieting things about the community and its past. As he begins to learn the truth, the place comes to seem much less of an idyll.

Harvest Home owes a clear debt to Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, but overall I found it better realized. The characters and the world they operate in are more fully fleshed out and believable. It also bears an interesting similarity to The Wicker Man (it even has shades of the newer, Nicolas Cage version, though not that one's silliness). It's not dated, but it has a definite '70s zeitgeist-type of feel.


27. Lovecraft Unbound by Ellen Datlow (ed.) - finished 5/4/10

As I mentioned above, the goal of this collection was to collect stories inspired by Lovecraft that don't descend into pastiche. This isn't the first time I've picked up a collection with that goal, but I think this one succeeds better than most.

As I mentioned above, "The Crevasse" was quite good, one of two solid Antartic stories, the other "Cold Water Survival," is easily the better of the two. Other stand-outs include "Houses Under the Sea" by Caitlin Kiernan, where a cult commits mass suicide by walking into the ocean--the telling gives it an Inssmouthish ring; "In the Black Hills," Michael Chabon's tale of industrial horror in a cursed town; "Leng" by Marc Laidlaw, in which the Lovecraftian horror manifests in the hunt for rare mushrooms on the Tibetan plateau; and "Mongoose," which spins HPL's themes into space opera for entertaining effect.

28. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin - finished 5/6/10

Not much of an intro when I started this book, and it appears what I wrote was sort of incoherent. What I meant was that I had originally created the category with second (or 3rd, 4th, etc) entries in a series I had already started and was changing it to include first books in a series as well.

As I said, I'm not a big fan of epic fantasy. The Lord of the Rings is quite good, but I've been wary of the rest of the genre since overdosing on those AD&D novels as a teenager. A friend once recommended Feist's Magician books, which weren't so much bad as just sort of aggressively bland. My genre fix was better satisfied by New Weird authors such as Jeff Vandermeer or China Mieville.

Places like Ambergris or New Crobuzon may be fantasy locations, but they also have a certain rough edge which makes you feel it'd be really awesome to visit, but you probably wouldn't want to stay after dark. Feist's Midkenia may have it's dark elves and orcs, but it never feels either fascinating or dangerous. Right from the start, Martin's Westerous comes off as a dangerous place, one in which even the "good" guys may not be so nice.

Overall, Martin delivers the epic aspect pretty well. The main focus is the Stark family, which rules the northernmost of the Seven Kingdoms, which are all under King Robert Baratheon. We see bits of the action from the two older sons, both daughters, mother Catelyn and father Eddard. We also get the perspective of two other characters, one is the brother of the Queen and the other is one of the survivors from the dynasty that Robert Baratheon overthrew. It's a complicated picture, but Martin does a good job of juggling all of the different characters and plots. It does have it's share of clichés, but so much in the book is well done that I found them forgivable. Will I be continuing with the series? Definitely, though I can't say when. Considering it hasn't even been finished yet, I don't feel too much of a hurry.


29. Halloween: New Poems by Al Sarrantonio - finished 5/7/10

I don't expect a collection like this to be great poetry, but it did sound like it could be fun. And sometimes it is fun or manages to evoke nostalgia or eeriness. Overall, it's hit and miss. Call me old fashioned, but I would have liked to have seen more traditional poetry and less free verse. I don't have anything against free verse, but I think it's harder to pull off.

Book Started: The Unicorn
Category: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

I confess to knowing next to nothing about Iris Murdoch except what I've gleaned from reading reviews of that one Kate Winslet/Judy Dench film. Normally, being the subject of a prestige picture isn't enough to convince me to check out an author's works, but when I stumbled across this book at a Friends of the Library I was enticed by the blurb on the back:

Only Iris Murdoch could combine the popular Gothic tale with modern psychological insights to make a story which terrifies as it reveals the secret agonies of desire.

Need I say more?

Book Started: Historias fantasticas
Category: Short Story Collections
Possible overlap categories: Weird Tales, Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

These are works of science fiction or fantasy from Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentine author who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Borges. After having read a couple, I can say they're pretty good, though not as powerful as Borges. The ideas seem more fleshed out, but I have to admit I'm something of a sucker for Borges' minimalism. (One has to feel for Bioy Casares, always trapped in the shadow of Borges, a phenomena I've contributed to myself just now.)

Book Started: Fledgling
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!
Possible overlap categories: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

One might quibble about whether this counts as horror, since it's not particularly scary. But for this year's challenge, I've decided anything with vampires (or other traditional horror beastie) will count. Fledgling is the story of a child vampire, who awakens one day to find herself terribly injured and with no memories of who she is or how she got there. As she begins to feed and grow stronger, she learns about her surroundings and becomes drawn into the mystery of how she wound up injured and abandoned to begin with.

Lately, I've been starting more books than I'm finishing. Hopefully, I'll be remedying that shortly. For now, though...

Book Started: Toby Alone
Category: A Series Subject

I recently received the ARC for Toby and the Secrets of the Tree from LT's Early Reviewer program. I tend to be adventurous with my ER choices since the odds of getting any particular one are so low. Case in point: Toby and the Secrets of the Tree is the second book in a series I was not familiar with. Instead of trying to see how well it holds up as a stand alone, I figured I'd hunt down the first (Toby Alone). Thankfully, my local library had a copy available.

Toby Alone concerns a 13-year old boy named Toby, one of a race of tiny humanoids who live on a tree. The beginning of the book finds him hiding from some rough characters who are hunting him for some unspecified reason. The plot flips back and forth from Toby's struggle to find safety in the lower branches of the tree and flashbacks to the series of events that have brought him to that situation. As with most YA/kid lit, there are moral lessons about courage and honesty as well as a sometimes heavy allegory about protecting the environment and the ills of unfettered capitalism. Overall, though, I'm enjoying it very much.

Book Started: Alraune
Category: Weird Tales

This is another ARC, this time from LT's Member Giveaway program. It's an ebook, which I'm reading on an iPhone. It's not the most convenient way to read it, though I like the portability. I have previously read Ewers' "The Spider," which Lovecraft was apparently a big fan of. From the blurbs I've read, I see that Alraune was influenced by Frankenstein. So far, I've just read the first chapter, which establishes the scene around a big house occupied by a large family. Then, near the end of the chapter, something mysterious turns up. It's a little slow, but got nicely creepy at the end there.

Enjoyed your thoughts on Wuthering Heights. And my hearty congratulations on finishing Moby Dick! I've never been able to get more than a few chapters in...

30. The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch - finished 5/18/10

The Unicorn begins with a little bit of a Gothic overload. Marian, a young, unmarried woman has been hired to be a governess for a rich family. This family lives in an isolated house (named Gaze Castle), in the isolated country side (desolate moors and a perilous coastline), the natives of which like to claim fairy ancestry. When she arrives, she learns she learns that there are no children, that she will in fact be serving as teacher/companion to Hannah Crean-Smith, who is only a few years older than herself.

Marian soon comes to learn some of the family's secrets, which range from the peculiar to the disquieting. It appears that Hannah may be a prisoner at Gaze Castle, but it's unclear what really holds her to the place. Hannah is not the only one who seems to be bound by mysterious forces. Murdoch uses the Gothic elements to create a very philosophical story about love and free will, with a haunting ending.

This was my first Iris Murdoch; I may read more of her works in the future.


31. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler - finished 5/19/10

This was my first Octavia Butler, whom I knew little about before her death a few years ago. Fledgling was apparently her last novel. As it turns out, the vampires in Fledgling are not undead but another species--called Ina--which share many of the traits of traditional vampires. They exist in a sort of symbiotic relationship with human beings. It's an interesting take on the theme, which usually portrays vampires as parasitic. Prose-wise, there's nothing particularly amazing about it, but I found myself really drawn into this world of Ina, who may look mostly human but have their own biological and social norms.

I'm not sure how intentional it is, but I get the impression that Fledgling uses some of its vampire theme to probe the dimensions of race and racism and how notions of group identity are constructed. For a vampire novel, there's not that much action, and much of the climax is taken up by a trial. That's not to say it doesn't offer up some of the traditional goodies of the vampire tale--Butler's Ina are quite sensual--but it's a novel that pays off in depth more than in thrills.


32. Toby Alone by Timothee de Fombelle - finished 5/20/10

Toby Alone is set in a world where characters of only a few millimeters in height live in a tree, where the tree functions as their world. (And while it doesn't mean that the word for world is forest, I was reminded of a certain blue people who put the hurting to an intergalactic mining corporation--hint: not the Smurfs.) Toby's dad is a scientist who discovers that sap is the energy source of the tree. Unscrupulous characters want to use that energy for their own gain, and Toby's family ends up exiled to the lower depths of the tree.

Soon, though, the sinister characters manage to seize control, turning the tree into a police state, and Toby finds himself on the run. It's a fairly interesting adventure, with a variety of characters and some moments of suspense and sadness. It's also surprisingly grim at times, though probably not much worse than the later Harry Potter novels. I did begin to wonder if the French had resisted some of the sanitization of traditional fairy tales that has gone on here.

Good summing up of Fledgling, I think. What remains with me is also the descriptions of Human/Ina relationships in all their complexity. I really liked how Butler unflinchingly presented it as just another way of being a family.

#103 - It does take a certain Ahab-like perseverance. :) I think it helped that I had listened to it on audiobook the first time around.

#105 - I agree. It's a very logical outcome from the symbiotic nature of the Ina, but also serves to call into question ideas of family in a way you rarely see.

Book Started: Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
Category: Weird Tales
Possible overlap categories: It Came from the Bookshelf!, Short Story Collections

Turns out Tales of the Mysterious and the Macabre is more along the lines of crime/mystery. There's nothing wrong with that, but with this category I wanted to focus more on tales of supernatural dread. So far, I've read "The Willows," which is a classic tale about two friends boating down the Danube. It's brilliantly written, and though not much appears to happen, Blackwood captures the lonely desolation of the place, so even while there's some ambiguity to the danger, one still feels a certain sense of dread.

Book Started: A Tale of Two Cities
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again

I read this in 9th grade English class, or at least I think I did. Very little of it has stuck with me... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...BLOOD...some court cases...twins...Madame Defarge knitting...something about a lion and a hyena...it is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. Overall, it didn't leave much of an impression on me, so I felt for many years justified in ignoring Dickens as a dull writer. However, I decided it was high time to call into question an opinion that was formed when I may not have been the most perceptive of readers.

My first thought, even before finishing the "best of/worst of" times section is that Dickens is a surprisingly straightforward writer, particularly for a 19th century author. I would think an opening paragraph of such sweep and ambition would be a temptation to break out the verbal fireworks, the 25-cent words and to find novel and unexpected mash-ups of noun with adverb and adjective. It's an effective passage, mainly through Dickens' use of juxtaposed opposites.

Book Started: Fausto y otros poemas
Category: Poetry & Prose
Possible overlap categories: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

This is a collection of gaucho-style poetry (poesia gauchesca), the first (and longest) of which is a conversation between two gauchos, wherein one recounts his experience of going to Buenos Aires and seeing a performance of Faust in the Teatro Colon.

33. Historias Fantasticas by Adolfo Bioy Casares - finished 5/24/10

Up above, I mentioned that Bioy Casares may suffer a little from being in Borges' shadow. While sort of inevitable, I think that's highly unfortunate. In fact, I think a case could be made for Bioy Casares as a better, or at least more enjoyable author than Borges. ABC's fiction has much of the cerebral head-scratcher quality and sense of delving into speculative realms as JLB's, but what it has that Borges' lacks is a sense of character, place, social milieu Admittedly, ABC is no Roberto Arlt, so this world is largely bourgeois or upper-class.

Admittedly, I'm a fan of Borges' stark simplicity, which tends to highlight the more conceptual aspects of his fiction. One of the big knocks against him is that lack of characters or plots, so I'd argue ABC gives you much the same experience in stories that are more fully developed.

The one weakness is that some of the stories seem to resolve themselves in an almost cursory fashion. It is possible that this is an intentional strategy to leave the stories open-ended in order to preserve a sense of mystery, or it may be intended as a sort of ironic absurdity, much as Macedonio Fernandez' novel intentionally subverts ideas of narrative.

But I think it's the attention to the social realm that makes these stories stand out for me. In one noteworthy example, ABC hints at an alien visitation of a small provincial town by noticing the small deviations from everyday life. Another delves into the effects of a coming apocalypse (which is itself left very nebulous) on a small coastal town, as despair sets in and people choose to fall into brutality.

I think a fair amount of ABC's work is in translation and worth recommending for anyone into Twilight Zone-like stories.


34. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood by Algernon Blackwood - finished 5/30/10

After finishing up this volume, I read the section on Blackwood in The Weird Tale, which gives me the impression that this little volume just scratches the surface of Blackwood's work. There's some pretty good stuff in this collection, though some stories that struck me as only okay.

"The Willows" and "The Wendigo" are brilliant tales of mankind's encounter with the unexplained while in the unforgiving wild. These two also share the trait of being the sort of work that creates a very creepy atmosphere while never letting you really get a handle on what's going on. These are easily the best, though I also liked the odd vampiric duel of "The Transfer" and the non-supernatural but still very strange confrontation with the sinister "Max Hesing."

Some stories seem a bit of a letdown, since while still quite good, they tend towards the conventional, such as the fairly straightforward haunted house of "The Empty House," or the two John Silence stories "Secret Worship" and "Ancient Sorceries." (These are also a little harmed by the use of a psychic detective whose role seems to be largely to provide exposition.)

Blackwood's skill with the weird tale is very reminiscent of two other British authors, on whom he must have been an important influence. The first is Robert Aickman, whose stories share with Blackwood's a powerful atmosphere built up through incidental detail. The other is Ramsey Campbell, who can write some great short stories and who has a way of using visual details to give these stories a great cohesion.


35. Fausto y otros poemas by Estanislao del Campo - finished 6/1/10

The preface tells how Estanislao del Campo and a friend once went to see a performance of Faust at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. At some point, Campo decided to begin commenting on the proceedings using gaucho vocabulary and adopting a gaucho perspective. The two found it so funny that Campo decided to write the poem here, in which one gaucho recounts to another his viewing of a performance of the same opera.

I confess that ever since Martin Fierro, I've had a certain fondness for gaucho poetry. There's something neat about the language and the expressions, although I confess to feeling a little lost sometimes. (Unlike the Fierro I read, this work was not annotated.) Overall, I liked the title poem. There's an obvious ironic distance between the highbrow opera and the manner in which it is recounted, though that premise wears a little thin at times. Still, there's enough wordcraft and humor to make the piece worthwhile.

Of the other poetry, not all of it was in the gaucho idiom. Some of it dealt with Argentine history or current events, and I confess I felt myself a little lost. Others were more universal and generally pretty good.

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36. City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer - finished 6/7/10

"What can be said about Ambergris that has not already been said?" So begins the epigraph for City of Saints and Madmen, in a quote taken from a resident of the same city, which is a pretty good signpost of the crazy, metafictional, postmodern fantasy in store for the reader. Some books are doorways, opening new vistas in literature, drawing the reader not just into their own labyrinthine (or is it librynthine?) world but also feeding a hunger for other works. I picked up CSM largely on a whim, having first learned of it while reading about authors influenced by Borges. (Borges’ work itself being another of those doorways.) I didn’t know anything about New Weird or Slipstream or Steampunk, but an interest in Borgesian works and some favorable reviews convinced me to take a chance.

There’s definitely a fair amount of Borges in Ambergris--and not just in the name of the local bookseller—but also multiple other sources that VanderMeer is drawing from. Superficially, CSM is just a collection of short stories set in the same city with certain links between them, much like M. John Harrison’s Viriconium (which in my personal geography lies beyond Ambergris), but that doesn’t do justice to VanderMeer’s use of the postmodern arsenal to heighten the sense of fantasy and absorption. The first time I read this book, I became mildly obsessed with it and found myself writing notes in the book: cross-referencing, drawing out the chronology, the geography, trying to craft family trees. Postmodernists will tell you that the act of reading constructs the text, but CSM makes that process more fun and intoxicating than nearly any work I have ever read.

After the introductory material, the collection starts with “Dradin In Love,” in which the title character comes to Ambergris just in time to observe the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, fall in love, and have some terrifying encounters. The second work is a short history, presented as a pamphlet, though with plenty of footnotes which give you a sense of the pamphlet writer’s personality. The third story, “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” is about one of Ambergris’ most celebrated painters. Among other things, we learn that “Dradin In Love” exists as a work of fiction in Ambergris, written by the same Dradin about whom the story is. With the fourth story, “The Strange Case of X,” things start to get really strange. X is interned at a mental hospital, because after writing the stories which created Ambergris, he began to believe it was a real place. “The Strange Case of X” also serves as something of a pivot point, since the stories that follow are all alleged to have been left behind by X when he escaped the mental facility.

CSM is pretty radical as a work of fantasy, because it is singularly preoccupied with its own status as a work of fiction. While some people may find that sort of textual self-reflection annoying, I think it really brings the city of Ambergris to life. The first time I read it, it felt less like reading about a place and more like exploring it. The combination of postmodern approach with genre fiction is a strange mix, the two approaches sometimes at cross purposes. What CSM manages to achieve is that its postmodern technique makes the reader feel like a collaborator in the fiction, almost a co-conspirator in this fictional creation, which gives it the sense of being more “real,” or at least authentically artificial.

(One inappropriate comparison: There’s an odd blend of the whimsy and dread in Ambergris, which is difficult to pull off yet generally works. It reminded me in that extent of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which also attempts a similar mix, though IMHO less successfully. The Eyre Affair may be the first dystopian novel where the bread and circuses are intended as much for the reader as for the characters.)

Hi Carlos, I have long last decide to err. de-lurk (and not to say anything pithy either) but I just had to say that was a damn fine review of City of Saints and Madmen.

I'm with Claire. Not the easiest work (or world) to summarise, but you're doing a very respectable job! It's interesting how VanderMeer actually makes storylines simpler (well, relatively) in the books to come, rather than complicating things further. Which, frankly, is the direction in which this the first book seems to be pointing :)

One of my favourite things about Ambergris is that, despite all allusions ans literary tricks VanderMeer deploys (travel guides, realistic fiction written inside the world, journals, footnotes and so on), the BIG storyline, the one about the city itself and the Gray Caps, is told more or less chronologically straight.

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37. Toby and the Secrets of the Tree by Timothee de Fombelle - finished 6/9/10

Speaking of curious blends of whimsy and dread, there’s certainly copious amounts of both in Timothy de Fombelle’s Toby books. I’m not a big reader of children’s or YA literature, but I sometimes get an ARC in that category through Early Reviewers. I'm sometimes unsure how to read this, mostly out of a fear of nitpicking things a younger reader wouldn't mind. I didn't really run into that with this series, perhaps because it mostly won me over.

The previous book left off with Toby having fled the tree for the lands of the Grass People, an exile that he has accepted because he believes everyone who cared about him is dead or had betrayed him. On hearing that his parents still live, he decides to head back and rescue them.

What he returns to is even worse than what he fled from. The governance of the tree is shared between a greedy environmental despoiler and a vengeance obsessed young man. The damage done by run-away excavation is starting to have serious impact. Dissenters and Grass People are forced to work as slaves in the excavation project. Changing things will require Toby to meld back into the world he abandoned and draw on the friends and allies he left behind.

The conceit in the Toby books, of a race of tiny people who live on a tree, works surprisingly well. The world is simultaneously familiar and strange--people eat grub eggs, use weevils as excavation animals, make armor out of insect hides. There's nothing inherently supernatural or fantastic, but Fombelle makes the most out of creating a sense of wonder through this tinier perspective.

The action is quite moving, and the characters, though drawn in the broad strokes one would expect from a fairy tale are often engaging, sympathetic and even a little surprising. Between the fascinating world and the winning characters, I found myself quickly becoming absorbed in both books.

If I had to point to a flaw, it'd be that sometimes the ecological allegory feels a bit heavy handed. This is only a minor quibble. Also, I get the impression a certain degree of morality/moralizing is pretty common to children's lit. Anyway, it rarely took away from my enjoyment of the book.

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38. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - finished 6/10/10

I’m not sure if I have much to add in terms of commentary to Dickens’ classic work, aside from my own reaction. I hadn’t picked up Dickens in over 10 years, though I had seen some BBC and Hollywood adaptations of his works. Overall, I liked it, but some parts are certainly better than others. My main complaint, though I will readily admit it is probably a good source of Dickens’ success, is that the heroes sometimes seem a little plain. Lucy and Charles seem like nice enough people, but their straightforward nobility makes them a little flat and generally leaves them as reactive to events. My interest was drawn more towards the more complex characters: clever if damaged Sydney Carton, haunted Dr. Manet, vengeful Lady Defarge.

I think Dickens is at his most powerful when he’s addressing the iniquity of the world, especially the arrogance of power of the nobility and corresponding desperation and hunger of the poor in pre-revolutionary France. Even when he paints a picture of the terrors of the revolutionary tribunals, he links it clearly to the oppression under which people suffered for so many years. That sense of moral justice really comes through.

Though I feel I have a better grasp on Dickens, I’m not sure my opinion about his work has changed all that much. It’s definitely a different experience than the first time I picked up Moby Dick, and was shocked by how funny and how terrifying Melville could be. I suspect because of the quality of Dickens’ writing, curiosity will eventually bring me around to some of his other works, but I confess for the moment I don’t feel particularly compelled to seek any out.

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39. Finch by Jeff VanderMeer - finished 6/12/10

Anders, you beat me to the punch on the way the books become more straightforward as the series progresses. :) While Shriek is definitely less complicated than CSM, it still has it's more literary approach. Also, Shriek, like CSM, is mean to be a book within the world of Ambergris. Finch never plays that sort of game with its own status as a book.

Finch is in some ways a pretty straightforward hardboiled detective story, albeit located in Ambergris and so markedly weird in some ways. I found the beginning a little disappointing, perhaps because John Finch initially seemed a little soft for the role, but it got better (and wilder) as the book progresses. It is a satisfying conclusion to the mysteries and dilemmas first laid out in CSM, though I have to admit it didn't inspire the same kind of goofy obsession/immersion that CSM did.

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40. Nombre Falso by Ricardo Piglia - finished 6/12/10

(Translation: Assumed Name) I'm going to backtrack a little into the concept of books that guide you to other books. After being introduced to the works of Roberto Arlt, I started trying to seek out some of his works. I was living in the Seattle area at the time, and a search in the KCLS catalog under "Arlt" turned up this collection. It is a collection of short stories from early in Piglia's bibliography. Overall, the stories are pretty good, with some better than others. The strength of this collection is the title story.

"Nombre Falso" has two parts. The first is a first-person account of Piglia trying to dig up any undiscovered material from Roberto Arlt, such as essays, letters, notes, etc. He is contacted by a man who used to rent workspace to Arlt, and who has some documents in his possession. Piglia enumerates the documents, including a notebook with a large portion of pages missing from the middle. Upon further investigation, he contacts a former colleague of Arlt's, a failed poet, who reveals that he does in fact have a complete and unpublished story from Arlt in his possession. The final section is the discovered story, about a young anarchist who finds refuge in a cathouse.

The whole thing is a literary hoax, pulled off in a way that is fairly convincing yet manages to hint heavily at the fraudulent nature of the narrative. Piglia has achieved a fusion of Borgesian metafictional play with an Arltian sense of crime and the con. Piglia's combination of these two influences brings some fascinating insights to how one approaches fiction. There's one section I liked so much, I'm going to quote it here (in rough translation):

A literary critic is always, in some form, a detective: he perceives on the surface of the text, the prints, the residues that allow him to decipher its enigma. At the same time, this assimilation (which is somewhat paranoid) of criticism with police pursuit, is already transparently present in Arlt. On the one hand, Arlt always identifies writing with crime, fraud, falsification. In this scheme, the critic appears as a police inspector who can discover the truth. ... Finally, when one says--as Arlt did--that all critics are failed writers, doesn't this confirm one of the classic myths of the detective novel?: the detective is always a frustrated criminal (or a potential criminal). ... In more than one sense, the critic is also a criminal.

This struck me as very radical, perhaps because I was used to more traditional notions of writers as moral exemplars, of reading as uplifting. To link the act of writing with that of fraud seemed to flip this notion on its head, yet it also seemed to make a lot of sense. It's a notion that has stuck with me--a new, sometimes quite useful, perspective to bring to a text.

Book Started: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again

Originally read it as a senior in high school and dismissed it (perhaps unfairly) as "like a very long and dull episode of the Wonder Years." Won't say much about it, except, "Young Stephen, the right answer to Weber's question is: Actually, I kiss your mom every night before I go to bed."

Book Started: The Cipher
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!

Before steampunk or elfpunk or others, there was splatterpunk. Combination of body horror with urban grittiness. Short-lived as a literary movement, though arguably influential. This story involves a mysterious black hole in the storage room of a tenement building. Though I think of it as an anti-Aleph, the characters call it the Funhole. Quite strange.

Book Started: Adán Buenosayres
Category: Books on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
Possible overlaps: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

First(?) maximal novel published in Argentina. Influence by Ulysses. Quite funny in parts so far.

Book Started: El otro, el mismo
Category: Poetry & Prose
Possible overlaps: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

Borges' poetry, including "El Tango," which was recorded (as a tango) with music by Astor Piazzolla.

41. The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany - finished 6/14/10

The Council of the land of Erl decides that what the land lacks is magic, and so they request for the King to bring more magic into the land. The King sends his son into the the realm of Fairy to bring back a princess from that realm so as to fulfill this request. This quest is only the beginning of the adventure, as the arrival of the Princess is not exactly what the Council bargained for.

Soon, though, the princess returns to Elfland, and the prince sets out on a new quest. Now the King of Elfland is ready for him, so the Prince finds his quest more difficult and enlists the aid of a shepherd, a poet, a fool, and a moon-struck madman. Meanwhile, the son of the Prince and his Fairy Princess grows to a young man and begins to hunt for unicorns with the aid of a mischievous troll from the land of Fairy.

The story is something of a swan song for Dunsany's early style, a unique sort of pseudo-Biblical prose which creates a real sense of fantasy. In some ways, it's the opposite of much modern fantasy. The story is relatively low on plot and action but very imaginative, with a very playful sense.


42. The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen - finished 6/17/10

In retrospect, this is a bit of a strange book, not because there is anything particularly strange about either work, but because they would not be the most intuitive of Machen's works to print together.

The Great God Pan is Machen's first published story. It begins with the story of a young woman who is subject to an experiment that allows her to pierce the veil and experience reality directly. The result drives her insane. Later chapters in the tale follow first the story of a girl adopted by a rural family who seems to cause the madness or death of two young playmates, and later the trail of some prominent gentlemen and their mysterious suicides. Very popular in its time and fairly influential, but the story is a little bit dated. A little too Victorian in its approach, the story sometimes reads as a shocked reaction to sex.

The Hill of Dreams is a different matter altogether. Machen's style is rather improved in this novel, surreal and dream-like that matches the theme of the novel. The novel is an autobiographical account of an aspiring author who seeks to capture a certain numinous quality in his writing and poetry. Much centers around his childhood home and the nearby Roman ruins, which fire up his imagination and inspire that sense of mystery he seeks to express. He finds himself at odds with society and draws away as he delves more deeply into his work. It's a fairly moving work with an ambiguous ending. The Introduction to this story is also quite good, and manages to be both funny and somewhat heart-wrenching. (Machen lays out the creative process in all of its frustrating grind.)


43. The Weird Tale by S.T. Joshi - finished 6/17/10

Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi's work regarding Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft whose work overall spans teh end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. In the introduction, Joshi lays out an interest premise (and one of the rationales for the volume): that the weird tale of this era exists not as a genre but as an expression of a world view. It's an interesting premise, but when one gets into the individual chapters it doesn't hold up. Joshi is on strongest ground when dealing with Machen, Blackwood, and Lovecraft, all of whose works prominently feature their particular philosophy. A little less so with Dunsany, and much less so with James and Bierce.

It's an interesting look at these classic authors of weird fiction and their work. Joshi is still somewhat in Lovecraft scholar mode, leaving HPL until last and devoting more pages to his fiction and its particular world view than he does to that of any other author. I did actually wonder if Joshi had selected authors whose work was most influential on Lovecraft instead of those who best followed up on that proposition of the weird tale as the expression of a particular weltanschauung. Occasionally, Joshi's own bias for what he thinks a piece of fiction should do causes him to stumble, but he's overall a pretty interesting critic, especially since he's delving into a variety of fiction often overlooked.


44. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - finished 6/21/10

After reading Jane Eyre, it turned into something of a foregone conclusion that I'd eventually get around to Rhys' portrayal of the first Mrs. Rochester. Though connected to Eyre, it's overall a very different novel. The style struck me as somewhere between flashback and stream-of-consciousness, as of the characters looking back on events that have haunted their lives, but not as in Eyre having the power to craft them into a narrative of redemption.

The story begins with Antoinette's life in the Jamaican estate of Coulibri, which has fallen into financial ruin after the emancipation of the slaves. Antoinette lives with her widowed mother and invalid brother, cut off from society with the former slaves of the island often hostile. Her mother remarries, but after tragedy strikes, the family flees Coulibri, Antoinette is sent to a boarding school and her mother suffers a nervous breakdown.

The marriage of Antoinette and the unnamed Rochester takes up most of the middle section, and it is one fraught with the inability of characters to perceive, to communicate. Truth seems to be always in play, subject to (mis)interpretation or willful forgetting. Jane Eyre intelligently deploys its Gothic tropes, but Wide Sargasso Sea represent something more akin to a colonial Gothic, one in which the lines of entrapment cannot be so easily traced.


45. The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth - finished 6/21/10

The Lurker at the Threshold, like the stories in The Watchers Out of Time, is a “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft, this time as a novella or short novel. Derleth gets a little more ambitious with the story structure, breaking it up into three distinct narratives. Thematically, the story falls back into the man inherits property which is connected with bad juju plot that Derleth seems to rely so much on in Watchers.

The first third of the novel is a third person account of the arrival of Ambrose Dewart to the old Billington home in Massachusetts, which belonged to an ancestor of his. The action here builds slowly, as Ambrose begins to explore his surroundings, including some curious features of the house, the nearby town of Dunwich, and some suggestive old documents that the previous inhabitant left behind. Despite some occasionally awkward writing, it’s a pretty enjoyable section which captures that Lovecraftian feel of discovering a horror along with the protagonist. Soon Stephen is having strange dreams and finding evidence that he may be sleep walking. This freaks him out enough that he decides to write to his cousin.

The second section shifts the POV to Ambrose’s cousin, Stephen, who narrates in first person. There’s not much point to this, since Stephen’s first person narrative sounds almost exactly like the narrow third-person perspective of the first section. Stephen goes over some of the same research as Ambrose, and also observes his cousin’s increasingly erratic behavior. Soon, even more disturbing hints and sights come to his attention. Things come to such a point that he decides to consult an acquaintance at Miskatonic University.

Stephen’s contact with Miskatonic to call in the cavalry makes up the third section, which is also told in first person. This time the narrator is Winfield Phillips, junior professor and colleague of Seneca Lapham, who will serve as this story’s Armitage. This section reveals one of Derleth’s major flaws as a Mythos writer, his penchant for pointless expository dialogue. A large part of this section is taken up by a conversation between Phillips and Lapham in which the latter goes on, in the most long-winded, pompous terms about how the particular mystery of Chez Billington ties into the larger history of Elder Gods and Great Old Ones. This kills whatever sense of suspense or momentum the story has built up so far. After too many pages of this tedious exposition, the story reaches a very anti-climactic climax and then just sort of peters off. In what comes off as desperation, Derleth throws in one final italicized paragraph in which Phillips describes some of the horrors he has just witnessed.

Lurker features both the best and worst of Derleth’s efforts to write a Lovecraft story. The early section goes a long way towards portraying the horror to be found in piecing together disassociated knowledge. But as the story progresses, Derleth abandons this approach in order to lay out the Great Old Ones vs. Elder Gods mythology in all of its detail. The shift of point of view, while an interesting effort, detracts from the story. As our first POV characters (first Ambrose, then Stephen) begin to draw close enough to the truth for things to get interesting, the point of view shifts. Derleth may have been going for something like HPL’s Call of Cthulhu, but the effort comes nowhere close. An interesting effort but largely a failure as a horror story.

Book Started: Move Under Ground
Category: What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
Possible overlaps: It Came from the Bookshelf!

Jack Kerouac and the beats take on Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Surprisingly effective mash-up.

Book Started: The Scarlet Letter
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
Possible overlaps: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

I'm not sure if this qualifies as Gothic, though many of Hawthorne's short stories and The House of the Seven Gables certainly do. Had to read in 10th grade but was unable to finish it because it kept putting me to sleep. Considering that I rather enjoyed House, I'm hoping I'll have more luck this time.

Book Started: Fungi from Yuggoth and other poems
Category: Poetry & Prose
Possible overlaps: Weird Tales

Derleth provides the intro to this collection of HPL poetry. Derleth may have a serious rap sheet of mucking up a decent Mythos tale, but I think his assessement is dead on. Aside from HPL's weird work, much of the other poetry is too archaic to be noteworthy.

Book Started: Pastoralia
Category: Short Story Collections

Since I already completed two big omnibus collections (for Roberto Arlt and Horacio Quiroga), I was originally planning to head straight to Cortazar. Instead, I figured I'd take a brief break and have opted for George Saunders' Pastoralia. Interesting stories of mostly down-and-out people, heavy on the satire of modern foibles.

@117 I love George Saunders! And Pastoralia is my favourite of the few I've read so far. I adored that story set in the pre-historic theme park. To me, Saunders seem like an american relative to Magnus Mills, have you read him? His styla and topics also remind me a lot of playwright Richard Dresser.

Book Started: Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
Category: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

Considered the first Gothic novel written in the US. Per the introduction, influenced by the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe. Started it a few days ago, but sort of slow going.

Book Started: Haunted
Category: The Library of the Infinite Return; or, Déjà Vu All Over Again
Possible overlap categories: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines, It Came from the Bookshelf!, Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

I confess to being a little distracted nowadays, which is making it harder to read in Spanish (Cortazar or Adan Buenosayres) as well as to handle the Radcliffesque pacing of Wieland. I’m hoping the harder edged, over-the-top Gothicity of Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted will keep me a little better focused. Haunted was my first Palahniuk. I had been meaning to read Fight Club since after the movie came out, but hadn’t ever gotten around to it. In 2006, a coworker of mine offered to lend me a bootleg copy of the Haunted audiobook. I jumped at the chance because not only had I been intending to read Palahniuk for years, but what little I had read about Haunted intrigued me. Not so much the bit about people fainting as the fact that it was a work of horror from an author tagged as a nihilist, which made me hope I was in for the same sort of thrilling, revelatory experience I had as reading Thomas Ligotti’s Grimscribe. Also, though a novel, much of the book was made up short stories, which are generally a much better vehicle for horror.

What I read was both more and less than I expected. The first story (“Guts”) definitely left an impression, as well as some mild nausea. More horrors abounded, often through scenes of bodily destruction as well as some taboo defying behavior. Yet, overall, I was left with mixed feelings. There seemed to be a lot going on with the novel, yet it didn’t really hang together. The relationship between the short stories and the framing narrative seemed questionable, and neither did the social and philosophical commentary seem to mesh well with the events of the story. There was something of a Frankenstein quality to it, not because it was reminiscent of the classic tale from Mary Shelley, but because it felt stitched together. However, with so much going on, I considered the possibility that perhaps it was beyond me, too provocative for my middle class sensibilities while too subtle in its philosophy.

Looking back on it now, it strikes me as the sort of sentiment that must have been the product of a literary inferiority complex. I thought of myself as principally a reader of Lovecraft-type horror trying to branch out a little, so there must be some failure on my part. It couldn’t possibly be that an author as brilliant and respected as Palahniuk had flubbed something as low-brow as a horror story, could it? I confess that this conundrum inspired a certain degree of obsession with the book. I ended up seeking out all of the Palahniuk interviews related to the novel (Well, those available on the web) in the hopes of getting a better sense of the novel and later delved into Palahniuk’s other works. Since then, I’ve often considered revisiting Haunted, and I figured this is a good a time as any.

Haunted kicks off with an epigraph from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”: “There was much of the beautiful, mich of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” I’ll probably delve more into the way that “Masque” informs the story, as well as Palahniuk’s take on Poe once we I get a little deeper into the book, but since we’re in Gothic territory, I want to delve into the past a little. Heck, let’s go all the way back to The Castle of Otranto, generally recognized as the first Gothic novel. Walpole incorporated all forms of supernatural elements which he figured might seem hokey to his then-modern audience, so he set the story in Italy of a couple of centuries back, believing this to be a time and place where such things might be more readily believed. The first edition of Otranto compounds this somewhat by including an introduction which states that the story is actually a translation of an old Italian manuscript written in the approximate era as that in which the story is set. I find it intriguing that the Gothic genre kicks off with this little bit of fraud, especially since it’s a mode of fiction that frequently makes use of hidden identities.

The full title of Haunted is Haunted: A Novel or Haunted: A Novel of Stories, either of which features a little bit of misrepresentation. Haunted did not begin as a novel, but as a collection of short stories. A framing narrative was added in order to take this disparate collection of stories, which do not appear to have been written around a central theme, and make a novel out of them. That narrative actually started out as a different story, a novella about critics isolating themselves from the world and then going slowly mad. It seems so very appropriate that a novel as concerned with stories as ghosts and vice versa features its own ghost of a story, one which actually lines up more closely with that epigraph. “The Masque of the Red Death” is the story of how in the midst of an epidemic of a very contagious and highly disease, Prince Prospero and his court lock themselves up in a palace and hold a masquerade ball. The masquerade features a collection of rooms, each designed around a color theme and with the goal of indulging the senses. All kind of outré and wild costumes and behavior are celebrated, but then someone walks in wearing a mask which reproduces the worst symptoms of the plague. This is too much for Prince Prospero who then (SPOILER WARNING) chases after the figure, only to find that it is the very plague itself in human form, and that he and his court have been trapped in with that which they had hoped to keep out. (Yes, that is a spoiler warning on a 150+ year old story, though if you haven’t already read “Masque,” I’m hoping this will serve as something of a wake-up call.)

In Palahniuk’s ghost of a story, the critics decide to isolate themselves from society because they have decided that they hate everything the culture that they review. They plan to set up their own community where they can create their own art, literature, etc. Yet because they are critics and not artists, they cannot create anything and so end up cannibalizing themselves and each other. (I’m tempted to stop here and ponder the irony of critics who dislike the very thing they center their careers around or question Palahniuk’s sharp dividing line between artists and critics. I think reading some reviews of Palahniuk’s Diary, especially that of Salon’s Laura Miller, will probably suffice to show what inspired Palahniuk to write that story.) As with “Masque,” a group of people hole themselves up hoping to escape something terrible in the outside and create their own idealized world only to find doom within that same enclosure they had believed would provide safety.

When discussing Haunted, Palahniuk sometimes talked about writing the sorts of "dark things Poe couldn't write about in his own time," which I confess I find a somewhat questionable notion. I'll have more to say later on, though for the moment I find myself wondering to what extent can a book itself serve as an author's escape from the threatening critics rampaging outside, and can a narrative trap itself by those strategies it had hoped would provide it with salvation?

I’ve sadly fallen somewhat behind on logging my reading, so I’m going to try a couple of marathon updates:


46. The Cipher by Kathe Koja – finished 6/25/10

It’s sometimes tempting to take a shortcut with describing things. I could describe this novel as “Thomas Ligotti suffering from heroine withdrawal” or “Chuck Palahniuk minus literary pretense or factoid dumps,” but I’m not really sure I’d be doing it justice. To sum up, a failed poet and his on-again, off-again love interest discover a curious thing in the basement of his apartment building. It appears to be some form of hole, a strange dark spot which absorbs light. Strange phenomena are associated with it, and the would-be GF becomes obsessed with it. The hole begins to dominate the protagonist’s life, bringing in stranger and stranger people bound up with the local art scene. The Cipher is generally considered part of the splatterpunk movement, which sought to make horror fiction more gritty and urban. This one definitely qualifies. Along with the flop-house apartment where much of the action takes place, it has among the least sexy sex scenes I’ve ever read, making this a novel that sometimes feels as grimy as it does creepy. I confess that I liked it overall, in part because the book does manage a balance between the dismalness of its characters and the fantastic eeriness of its central conceit.


47. El Otro, El Mismo by Jorge Luis Borges – finished 6/28/10

In the last year or so, I’ve started to make an effort to read more poetry. Though I feel I’m starting to get a better sense of poetry, I would still confess to being very much an unsophisticated reader of same. I say this by way of explaining why I will not be able to fully elaborate on what I like about Borges’ poetry. Nonetheless, I do like Borges’ poetry quite a bit. It’s often fairly philosophical in theme, dwelling on eternity or the elusive nature of selfhood, and Borges can even take a theme like the knife fighters of Buenos Aires and give it sort of a transcendent twist as he does in “El Tango” which, along with Astor Piazzolla’s production of same, should be considered a classic.


48. Obras: Cuentos I by Horacio Quiroga – finished 6/29/10

Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, Cuentos de la selva, El salvaje, Anaconda, El desierto, Los Desterrados—per the introduction, these six collections of short stories (all gathered in this volume) are considered central to Quiroga’s legacy. Quiroga also wrote novels, poetry and commentary, but it’s the stories that have had the most impact and been the most influential. There’s certainly some great stories in this volume, though the feeling is sometimes a little hit and miss. The stories in Amor Locura y Muerte seem like among the strongest, though that may be because they come first and lay down a lot of the themes that Quiroga will come back to. One of the major themes running through many of the stories is the confrontation between man and nature. Among my favorites is “The Feathered Pillow,” a different sort of vampire tale. “Jungle” is more like a collection of children’s stories, told from the point of view of the animals. El salvaje, Anaconda and El desierto mix things up a little more, blending tales of wilderness survival with more experimental stories such as “Dorothy Phillips, my wife” which seems to prefigure Borges’ more sophisticated metafictions. I thought the last collection Los Desterrados (The Exiles) was pretty solid overall. It centers around the theme of men from Europe or from the cities trying to forge some measure of success in the jungle. Quiroga draws up some interesting characters to be at the center of these stories, and this blend of unique characters and their odd schemes in the middle of the wilderness was very strongly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude. (It’s one thing to read about Quiroga’s influence on the Latin Boom literature. It’s another to find it for oneself.)


49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce – finished 6/30/10

This year, I decided to revisit some classics that I had read (or attempted to read) for junior or senior high school and had found underwhelming. Though I had found Portrait largely dull as a high school senior, I had high hopes for it, in part because I had read that Joyce was an author that Borges thought highly of. If Borges thinks this guy’s all that, I figured, I should give him another shot. Sad to say, I continue to be underwhelmed. There were aspects of the novel that I liked. I can see how it traces Stephen’s development as a poet, from his early fascination with the sound of words to his later formation of an aesthetic theory as well as his poetic attempts to capture certain transcendent moments. It’s also interesting how the style shifts to match the character’s maturity, from the heightened stream of consciousness of his early childhood to the more sophisticated and poetic prose of his early manhood. Sadly, that means the middle sections fall somewhere in between, an awkward sort of adolescent prose given to too many overheated metaphors (“he felt as if his side were pierced by a rapier.”) Also, as far as modernist prose style is concerned, (and to paraphrase Royce da Five-Nine) Joyce ain’t that eye-brow raisin’ to me. I’ll take Hemingway’s minimalism or Faulkner’s Southern Gothic over Joyce’s prose. I won’t dispute that Joyce is important and influential—that would be a mug’s game—but I wonder if he’s been so influential that what seemed like innovation in 1920 looks tame nowadays.

I have to say that Haunted sounds like a rather self-indulgent idea for a story, if that makes sense. It sounds like the author is enjoying skewering the critics and is writing it purely for that pleasure, rather than because it makes sense for a story. It honestly sounds like a silly idea for a story, to me anyway. But I guess it might work. I'll be interested to see what you think when you're done, but it doesn't sound like one that I will read for myself.

I think there's quite a bit that's self-indulgent about Haunted. I can see why an author would be tempted to write a story like that, but I also think it's probably a good thing that the original story never saw the light of day.

For the moment, I'm planning to write about every section individually. I was originally going to post them all on here, but then I thought that was a bit self-indulgent on my part. I was going to just post them on my blog, maybe toss a link to it here.

Here's the link to all the posts.

I'd be curious if anyone feels I should keep posting them on here.

@118 - Sorry, Gingerbread, not ignoring you. Symptom of being behind and not even knowing where to start. I agree that Pastoralia is brilliant and funny. (Not familiar with Magnus Mills or Richard Dresser though.)

Not feeling ignored at all, thanks - just popped in to catch up on your thread today :)

I've been very curious about both Kathe Koja and Thomas Ligotti since reading their stories in the VanderMeers' New Weird collection. The cipher sounds like it could very well be my cup of goo. Where would be a good place to start with Ligotti?

Check out Magnus Mills, by the way. I have a feeling you might enjoy his work. All quiet on the orient express and Three to see the king are my personal favourites.

Judging from the descriptions, both of those Mills books sound quite good.

As for Ligotti, that's somewhat complicated by the vagaries/economics of small press publishing. Several years ago, a small publishing house came out with a little collection by the name of The Shadow at the Bottom of the World. It was a nice sampling of Ligotti's work, from the earlier stuff ("The Frolic" "The Last Feast of Harlequin") to the later pieces ("The Red Tower"). At one point it was selling for 7 or 8 bucks on Amazon, and I thought to myself that I should buy up a whole bunch (10 or 20) so that I could give them away later to introduce people to Ligotti. It has since gone out of print and is only available at a price that pretty much relegates it to hard-core Ligotti fans.

All that aside, I would recommend Teatro Grottesco. I think it leans more toward his later stuff, which I think is quite good, though potentially less accessible.

50. Alraune by Hanns Heinz Ewers - finished 6/30/10

Alraune is a plant, commonly known (at least in the English speaking world) as mandrake. Quite a bit of mythology surrounds the mandrake, such as that it grows where the semen of hanged men falls to the earth, screams terribly when it is dug up from the ground, and has powerful magical properties. Ewer's novel Alraune takes the old myth and gives it a 20th century twist.

In it, Professor Jakob ten Brinken, on a suggestion from his nephew, tries to breed a human alraune through artificially inseminating a prostitute with the sperm of an executed criminal. The young woman who results has a strange effect on those around her, bringing success but also much ruination to those who associate with her.

The novel actually takes a little while to get started, first playing as something of a satire of upper-class German society circa 1910. And while apparently inspired by Frankenstein, I found the novel strikingly reminiscent of Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (whose publication precedes that of Alraune by about 20 years. Both feature a quasi-scientific experiment with a mythological twist (the scientist in Pan describes the purpose of his experiment as "seeing the Great God Pan") which result in the birth of a beautiful young woman who drives men to ruination and death.

(There's some interesting overlap among the two authors, Machen and Ewers, including their interest in occultism, which was apparently much deeper for Ewers.)

It's much less coy about sexual matters than Pan, though hardly explicit by contemporary standards. The phobia of female sexuality feels a little dated, but aside from that and the slowness of the beginning, it's a pretty good piece of weird fiction.


51. Horizonte de suceso by Willy G Bouillon - finished 6/30/10

Contemporary Argentine poetry. "Horizonte de suceso" translates as "Event Horizon," and there's often a strong scientific or astronomical element to the poems. Sort of a post-Borgesian approach, taking Borges' fascination with time and its flow a step further. It's free verse, but my sense of it is that it's quite good. Bouillon has apparently won some awards for his poetry and is also (nepotism warning) a family friend, which is how I came by this book. I also have another volume I'll have to check out some time.

52. Move Under Ground by Mamatas - finished 7/2/10

Jack Kerouac is in Big Sur when R´lyeh rises from the deep. The Great Old Ones are coming back, so Kerouac thinking the planet may need whatever dharmic firepower he can spare, sets out to stop them. This quest will take him to San Francisco, Denver, New York, and many points in between, during which he'll join forces with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. He's going to need the help, as the path to salvation is filled with those who have heard the call, beetlemen and mugwumps. (In an interesting inversion of Lovecraft, it's the average Joes and workday stiffs who are most susceptible to Cthulhu's influence.)
The Beats vs. The Great Old Ones seems like the kind of literary mashup that shouldn't work or would at least lose its charm in anything longer than a short story, so it's a pleasant surprise to see how well it works. The crazy energy of Kerouac's writing feels right at home with the end of the world, while capturing both Kerouac's spiritual hunger and his growing world-weariness. Nick Mamatas pulls off a fun, pulpy story with quite a bit of soul. close


53. Pastoralia by George Saunders - finished 7/6/10

Hillarious, often twisted stories of modern life, populated by characters whose struggles are often as tragic as they are amusing. In the title story, the narrator attempts to cling to his job pretending to be a caveman in an odd theme park. Other stories follow a disturbed little boy as his plan for revenge goes horribly wrong, a male stripper whose life is upended when his dead aunt comes back from the grave, and other characters


54. Fungi from Yuggoth by H. P. Lovecraft - finished 7/19/10

This little volume (edited by August Derleth) brings together a sampling of H.P. Lovecraft's better poetry. While I've often heard the opinion that Lovecraft's poetry is quite poor, reading this gave me the impression that's not an entirely fair. If there's one weakness to HPL's poetry, it's his archaism. This is especially true of the earlier works, where Lovecraft indulges his most Edwardian inclinations. The later poetry, beginning with The Ancient Track, while still somewhat old fashioned in style captures a pleasant weird vibe. Especially worthwhile is "The Fungi From Yuggoth," which features thirty-six different sonnets. Some are little scary stories in their own right, while others aim more for the sense of the numinous that often accompanies the horrible in HPL's fiction. While Lovecraft is arguably not the best weird poet of his era--that title would probably go to Clark Ashton Smith--I would argue he's worth reading for anyone in seeing this curious overlap betwixt the poetic and the uncanny.


55. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - finished 7/23/10

My impression of Hawthorne, this being the second of his books I've finished, is that his style initially feels impenetrable but as one becomes accustomed to it, it becomes quite engaging. That was my experience with The House of the Seven Gables, which at first I found hard going but then ended up really enjoying, and it was my experience with The Scarlet Letter. At first, I found myself thinking that the only reason this book is taught to high school students is to impress them with the fact that there was a time that making the sexy before marriage could land you in a mess of hot water. As with H7G, though, by the end of the novel, I found myself very much caught up with the characters and their struggle. This was worth revisiting, and I look forward to checking out Hawthorne’s short stories, sitting on Mt. TBR somewhere.

56. Adan Buenosayres by Leopoldo Marechal - finished 7/27/10

I confess that, looking at that cover now, I find myself wondering if anyone suggested the book would sell better if they opted for a picture of the author in his prime. Perhaps Marechal's aged visage is as iconic in Argentina as Borges'.

Adán Buenosayres is Marechal's own spin on Joyce's Ulysses, except that it also attempts to echo the book of Genesis (Adán is Spanish for Adam) through a seven-part structure, with the seventh part (or day) serving as a parodic transferral of Dante's Inferno. Oh, and it feature's a group of seven friends based on then-contemporary authors, who while perhaps not entirely "loco" are peculiar enough to suggest a connection with Roberto Arlt.

Got that?

I do not know if I could render much of a review, since what I've described so far only scratches the surface of this almost encyclopedic foray into Argentine culture and history.

57. No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo - finished 8/5/10

This was an Early Reviewer novel, and though I was attempting to restrict the Cien años de senderos que bifurcan category to works in Spanish, it's a novel from a Colombian author about two Colombians (a mother and a son) in Argentina, so it definitely belongs on there. (I did consider reading the original, untranslated work, but my library did not have a copy.)

The mother is an ex-Trostkyite who lived in Buenos Aires for several years during the Dirty War, where she fell in love with and married the man who became the boy's father. After the son's birth, the fear of being hauled away proves too great and the family flees back to Colombia. There the marriage fell apart, and the couple separated. The boy grew up without the father, and so they have come back to Argentina to find him.

It's a potentially rich concept, and the execution provides some very interesting themes and moments, but it has its flaws. On the positive side, it's an interesting look at the way narrative is part of how we make sense of our lives. The mother spends a good part of the time telling the boy the story of how he and his father met, fell in love, then came apart. This provides opportunity for a degree of back and forth between them on how the story is told, what facts are important, how is the narrative being dressed up, etc.

However, the novel sometimes feels a little false. The son, in particular, spoke in a way that didn't seem very plausible for an 18-year-old. Also, Restrepo sometimes attempts to underline her themes in ways that felt heavy-handed. One of the back cover blurbs compares the novel to Kiss of the Spider Woman or Waiting for Godot, but it lacks either of those works' confidence in letting the dialogue speak for itself without having to lay everything out for us.

Overall, an interesting novel, but not quite as satisfying as it could be.

58. Lovecraft: A Biography by L. Sprague De Camp - finished 8/12/10

August Derleth was apparently working for a long time on a Lovecraft biography but died before he was able to write it. So, it ended up that de Camp's became the first complete biography of H. P. Lovecraft ever published. Though it has since been superseded by S. T. Joshi's Lovecraft: A Life, I still couldn't resist picking it up when I found it in a used bookstore.

I can't speak to the degree which Joshi's version fills in the gaps left by de Camp's, but overall it feels like a pretty substantial account of Lovecraft's life, from his family background to his final days. Some of the psychology is somewhat outdated--I can't imagine that the word "schizoid" is still in current use as actual jargon among psychologists, and de Camp's discussion of homosexuality may have been accepted theory 40 years ago but would not pass muster today--and de Camp spends too much time apologizing for HPL's politically incorrect views (though it is a subject that would have to be dealt with in any serious treatment of the subject).

The largest flaw, however, would have to be de Camp's frequent editorializing about how Lovecraft should have lived his life. It'd be a bit like reading a bio of Vincent van Gogh in which the author described how the artist could have marketed himself better, how he should have drunk less absinthe, etc. I understand that de Camp is the sort of author who had to work had to make a living given his degree of talent, so it must pain him to see somebody with Lovecraft's talents not using them more effectively. Still, that sort of commentary is wholly unnecessary.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed it. I was a little surprised by how likable Lovecraft was. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, since I know his reputation as a recluse is mainly due to a large amount of exaggeration. Still, the impression of Lovecraft is of someone who is a little eccentric but still really interesting to be around. When I got to 1936, I actually got this feeling of, "Oh, no, he's going to die soon," as if he were a really fascinating character in a novel, and knowing his demise was coming up just seemed too tragic. Admittedly, Lovecraft was a fascinating personality and a fiction writer who could capture half of that complexity would have a great character on his hands.

59. Lovecraft by Hans Rodionoff - finished 8/13/10

I picked this up as soon as I finished with the de Camp bio. It's a graphic novel of a fictionalized version of Lovecraft's life. In this work, it turns out that all of the frightening supernatural stuff that Lovecraft wrote about (the Necronomicon, the Great Old Ones, Wilbur Whateley, Brown Jenkin, etc.) was based on reality. It's not a terribly original concept, though fairly ripe with possibility. It'd be easy to dwell on everything that Rodionoff gets wrong about HPL's life. However, given how many scenes and quotes seem to be taken directly from de Camp's biography, I don't think these are errors so much as intentional playfulness.

The art is by Enrique Breccia, an Argentine artist whose father also took part in a Lovecraftian graphic novel (but more on that later), and he does a pretty good job of balancing the bucolic scenes with the nightmare imagery.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but I do think it has a couple of flaws. After reading the de Camp bio, I was disappointed by how dull the character of Lovecraft came off here. Lovecraft in this book is a rather somber figure, lacking much in the way of charm or a sense of humour. If you're going to turn Lovecraft into an action hero, some pithy sendoffs would not be a bad idea. (Though what HPL's version of "Yippee ki yay, motherfucker" would be, I couldn't say.)

Also, the story seems a little brief. I've read it was originally based on a screenplay, so that may have something to do with it. Still, considering the amount of material available, both from Lovecraft's real life and his fiction, it feels a little rushed, especially near the end.

60. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King - finished 8/15/10

For the Prose part of Poetry & Prose, I'm reading books about writing. (Probably misusing the word Prose here, but so be it.) On Writing is a neat little combination of memoir and guide to the prospective fiction writer. Overall, I enjoyed it and think it had some interesting things to say. I'm not a huge King fan, but overall enjoyed this.

61. Junk Fiction: America's Obsession with Bestsellers by S. T. Joshi - finished 8/20/10

Joshi is mainly known for his work in Lovecraft scholarship, but he does wear other hats. I rather like his literary criticism, however flawed it can be. Seeing how he's a self-described elitist, a book like this, where he decides to read bestselling books from various genres, such as romance, horror, suspense, mystery, etc., has a certain questionable quality to it. Is this just an excuse to point his finger and mock some bestsellers or is there a real attempt to see what about the material makes these books commercially or even artistically successful?

Well, your mileage may vary on this one, but overall I found it an interesting book. As someone whose experience reading a Dan Brown book Angels and Demons was mostly mild irritation, followed (in the last fourth or fifth) somewhat delirious giggling as the silliness of it all got to me, I'm perhaps a little predisposed to Joshi's brand of elitism. Of all the books that he had read and commented on, I was only familiar with two (Patrica Cornwell's Black Notice and Brown's DaVinci Code, which I know mostly through the movie), and I got the impression he gave those works a pretty fair shake. (I think I would actually have been harsher with both works. Though Black Notice was pretty entertaining overall, it did not leave me tempted to seek out further Cornwell.)

I think Joshi does have blind spots that weaken some of his criticism. (Among Lovecraft fans, Joshi's dislike for "The Dunwich Horror" seems to have taken on the status of a running joke.) I'm not going to defend Dean Koontz' fiction, but I think comparing The Taking's Christian bent with the moral relativity of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" tells us more about Joshi's dislike of religion than the merits of Koontz' works.

Additionally, his commentary on Stephen King continues what would appear to be some sort of vendetta against the latter. I think Joshi's criticism of King's use of supernatural elements is mostly correct. Though I haven't read the novel in question, Bag of Bones, Joshi's criticisms reflected my own frustrations with the supernatural elements of Duma Key. However, I think Joshi gives a too little consideration for the effectiveness of King's plebeian prose style.

Overall, I thought this was an entertaining and informative work, and would recommend it to anyone not afraid to let themselves be tagged by the E-word.

I found this book while searching for Lovecraft commentary on Stanza. It doesn't fit any other category, so I'm expanding Poetry & Prose to literary criticism in order to include it.

62. Wieland: Or The Transformation: With Memoirs Of Carwin The Biloquist by Charles Brockden Brown - finished 8/26/10

I picked this novel up at a library book sale based on the blurb on the back that described it as the first American Gothic novel. The cover would suggest that it involves a bald man who has tiny dragons coming out of his mouth (perhaps even his skull), and if that had been in the book, it would probably be (by my estimation) at least 22 times as cool.

The book, overall, was a little bit of a disappointment, though the prologue did allow me to lower my expectations sufficiently. I think there were some good ideas in here, but also some major flaws. In terms of good ideas, I liked that the author realized that writing a Gothic set in America meant more than just placing the same old elements in an American setting. Instead he picks up some interesting elements such as religious fanaticism, spontaneous combustion and ventriloquism. (Okay, that last part probably played a little better when the novel originally came out.) The book is not afraid to delve into some really dark territory.

In terms of the flaws, well, the biggest one is that apparently Brown did not believe in revisions. (No, really, that's what the intro claimed.) The story sometimes has a feel of being made up as its going along, with red herrings, extraneous characters, and a plot that feels as if it's being made up as it goes along. There's actually a whole subplot about one of the main characters, which Brown decided to spin off into a separate tale, but then he never got around to finishing that either. Oh, some of the seemingly supernatural events get explained away at the end Ann Radcliffe-like in a way that struck me as almost as unlikely as the supernatural could have been.

I was a little put off when the intro mentioned that Brown felt that all fiction had to have a clear moral. In order to reiterate the moral, the novel spends the last 30 or so pages bringing up a barely mentioned subplot which reinforces the moral of the main plot, and then the last few pages outlining the lessons of these two stories. It was reminiscent of those He-Man cartoons of my youth which balanced their 20 minutes of toy selling extravaganza with 30 seconds of, "Orco chose to use He-Man's credit card to order tons of stuff of E-Bay, which was very wrong, and made him a very naughty flying munchkin" or whatever, but I found heavy-handed even as a kid.

Enjoyable, but I really couldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't already fascinated with old Gothic novels. Even among that crowd, I would say this ranks below Vathek, The Monk, or Melmoth the Wanderer.

Book Started: Las caras y las mascaras
Category: A Series Subject

Faces and Masks is the second book of Eduardo Galeano's masterful Memory of Fire trilogy, which traces the history of the Americas (particularly Latin America). The first book began with the mythical origins of the world (as understood by the continent's original inhabitants) and traced its way through Columbus' arrival all the way through the end of the 17th century. This volume will cover the 18th and 19th centuries.

Galeano's approach to the material is a sort of historical flash fiction. Short vignettes describing a time, a place, a character, an incident. The juxtaposition of all of the individual parts creates a sense of all the forces and personalities at work in shaping the social and political realm that is the Americas.

Book Started: Julia
Category: It Came from the Bookshelf!
Possible overlaps: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

It was Stephen King who observed that Straub doesn't so much write horror novels as much as old-style Gothic novels. I'm not sure this is quite true, though Julia fits the Gothic mold of the isolated woman in the house which holds secrets and some degree of menace. Here the woman, named Julia, has bought a large old English house after separating from her husband. It seems to me that Straub tips his hand a bit much by naming the estranged husband Magnus, which alludes (intentionally or not) to the widely anthologized "Count Magnus" of M. R. James.

63. Julia by Peter Straub - finished 8/30/10

Straub's first horror novel leans heavily on the two Jameses (not to be confused with The Two Jakes), combining Henry's theme of the naive American in over his/her head among corrupt Europeans with M.R.'s vengeful and sometimes all too physical spirits.

The title character is the American in question, who has left her domineering husband after the death of their daughter. During the process of settling into the large, old house she purchased on a whim, she spots a little girl who reminds her of her own lost child. This is only the first of a series of strange events which make Julia aware that something has taken an interest in her and which prompts her to investigate the history of the house.

This is the fourth Straub book I've read and while the style and some of the themes are familiar, I liked the more compact, intimate way it's structured. It makes for a more atmospheric and focused experience.


64. Los mitos de Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft - finished 8/31/10

When Enrique Breccia inked Lovecraft, he was somewhat following in the footsteps of his father, Alberto Breccia, who like Horacio Quiroga was a Uruguary-born Argentine. The elder Breccia was a groundbreaking comics artist, responsible for comics such as Mort Cinder and El Eternauta, which I have not read but am now intrigued to look into.

Breccia's visual adaptations are quite striking, though I lack the vocabulary to discuss them in much detail. I'll try to post some images in the next few days.

I remember reading Julia many years ago and actually getting really creeped out (in a good way, of course).

Of the Straub novels I've read, this was the scariest. I think the focus really adds to a sort of intimate creepiness.

130 -
I felt exactly the same way about that book! It had good moments, some good dialogue but at the end I gained nothing from reading the book. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

I'll be interested in your thoughts on the Galeano books. I read Genesis (Vol.1) last year, and just finished Faces and Masks. I liked the first volume much more, probably because I find that period of history--the time of the first contact between the Europeans and the people of the New World--so interesting.

Sorry for the double post.

I'm enjoying Faces and Masks greatly, though I do see your point. There's not the thrill of discovery, and the history of rebellion and repression can be a little repetitive at times. I still think Galeano does a brilliant job of capturing a sense of the times while also providing a sense of the forces that shaped the present day.

65. The Cthulhu Cult: A Novel of Lovecraftian Obsession by Rick Dakan - finished 9/8/10

I have to admit that one big motivator in reading this novel was that I was able to download it for free from Stanza. Interestingly enough, most of the action is set in Sarasota, where I spent five years earning a Bachelor's Degree. (At New College, which is mentioned in the book.)

The action revolves around two child hood friends: the narrator, Rick, and his best friend, Conrad. Another childhood friend, Shelby, comes to town after having been chased out over an orgy gone awry. He brings with him an exotic girlfriend and vague but oddly sounding plans related to H.P. Lovecraft, and for which he enlists the aid of the two friends.

As the two learn more about Shelby's plans, their questions only begin to multiply. How are he and his girlfriend funding the purchase of property and rare documents? Is Shelby really the materialist he claims or has he crossed over into believing in HPL's Great Old Ones? Is Shelby calling the shots or is the mysterious Kym he met in Providence? When a fourth childhood friend falls into the hands of the cult, Conrad and Rick decide to finally penetrate the cult's secrets.

It makes for an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into paranoia, philosophy and how things can spin out of control. I can't say whether a non-Lovecraft fan would enjoy it to the same extent, but Dakan's novel of Lovecraftian obsession brings a unique approach to the realms of fiction inspired by the Old Gent.

66. Las caras y las mascaras by Eduardo Galeano - finished 9/11/10

The second of Galeano's "Memory of Fire" trilogy, this one covering the 18th and 19th centuries. Galeano describes the sweeping events of history as a series of small vignettes, often concentrating on specific people or events from the era. Even having read the first book, it is still sometimes something of a shock at how effectively these moments not only provide a sense of what the time was like but also reflect the historic forces at work. This is in some ways a more depressing than the first, as attempts to reform the social structures of the New World are consistently co-opted or suppressed.


67. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake - finished 9/16/10

Herein continues the saga of Titus Groan, the titular hero who was only a few years old at the end of the previous novel. While this one didn't have as much in the way of delightful surprise, it was a joy to return to the world of Mervyn Peake. I love his language, his descriptions, and the way he creates characters that manage to be almost cartoonish grotesques yet have a real core of humanity. The novel climaxes with a tense showdown in a flooded section of Castle Gormenghast, which manages to be a real page turner. It is such a shame Peake died after having mostly completed only one more novel in this series, but I look forward to reading Titus Alone (probably next year).

@146 Titus Alone is much weaker in my opinion, but still very well worth a read. I love the first two books.

I have heard that, so my expectations are (hopefully) already dialed down on that one.

Update on Haunted:

I'd stalled out in my reading of this. After about 100 pages, I found I just couldn't face reading this book one more time.

Then a couple weeks ago, I had an inspiration (in part thanks to Cortázar's Rayuela): what if I were to read Haunted in a different order than intended?

I started by reading the all of the poetry in a couple of sittings. Then I read all of the short stories in order, save one sequence I saved for last (but more on that when I finish). I am now on the second day of reading the novella that is supposed to turn this collection of stories into a novel. It now becomes clear that this is the novel's major weakness. It's awful!

I'll leave it at that for now, getting into details when I finish the book. If I finish the book. This time, however, if I give up, that's it. I'll write up my impression of the poetry and the stories, and try to explain what was so terrible about the novella.0

68. The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski - finished 9/22/10

Grabinski was an early 20th century writer of horror fiction. He was something of an eccentric and apparently falls somewhat into the Blackwood/Meyrink camp of weird fiction authors who were into alternate cosmologies. Though none of these stories get into the realm of Lovecraft-like cosmic vision, he does share the approach of trying to contemporize the Gothic. Trains feature in several of his stories as totems of the power and strangeness of the new age, and some delve into more abstract forces, such as time and fire. I think his approach to sex was probably relatively straightforward for its time (say, if you were to compare his fiction with that of Machen or Lovecraft), but now is pretty tame.

A couple of stories that stand out as among my favorites in this collection: "The Area" is a tale of a neurotic author (shades of self-portrait) who gives up writing in order to seek alternate, less obvious modes of creation, and ends up bringing to life that which should have been left alone. "Saturnin Spektor" involves a man who is developing an esoteric model of time, but who finds he has an intellectual adversary who mocks those theories in the city's newspaper. It's a variation on the tale of the doppelgänger, crossed with the changing perceptions of time. (Though it didn't quite take the leap into Einsteinian space-time that I thought it might.)

I think I have to give up on Haunted. The novella is a deeply stupid book on multiple levels, from its inane philosophy to its one dimensional characters to its complete absence of a plot. What really drives me up the wall is Palahniuk's inability to pay attention to his own story. The following is a pretty good example.

On page 224: "Director Denial limps around with both feet wrapped in silk rags. All of her toes hacked off. Her left hand is nothing, just a paddle of skin and bone, just the palm, with all the fingers and thumb hacked off, this paddle wrapped huge with rags. Her right hand is just her thumb and index finger."

Then, page 292: "And the rest of us watch, and write this down. The way the Director's hands each hold a fistful of her uniform, a Clara Barton-long skirt and bib apron with a red cross on the chest and a folded nurse-cap pinned to the top of her wig, her fingers grip the skirt so tight they look blue."

Excuse me, a whatful of uniform? Her what are gripping so tight? Was this written under the influence of crystal meth, or can Palahniuk not be bothered to proofread his own goddamn story?

69. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk - finished/quit 9/26/10
70. The Sundial by Shirley Jackson - finished 9/27/10

Don't laugh, but in Gothic studies, they warn you not to read Palahniuk's Haunted around the same time you're reading Shirley Jackson. They just don't tell you why...

Well, it's not a big deal, really. Just that reading Jackson's masterful take on the contemporary American Gothic alongside Palahniuk's second-rate hackwork may cause nausea or feelings of frustration and anger. If this should happen, discontinue reading Haunted.

Back when I read Angels and Demons, I described my experience with the last fifth of the book as akin to Stockholm Syndrome. (I think it was the point when what's-her-face shouts "Houdini was a yoga master!) I hit some point where the ridiculousness took me from frustration to a kind of delirium. I giggled and giggled and didn't want it to stop. This time around with Haunted, I feel as if I achieved the reverse. Call it Death Wish Syndrome. I went from mild mannered reader, wanting to understand the author's intentions and appreciate what he did well to a kind of blind rage of thinking someone just needed to stride down the street of that novel with an automatic shotgun and clear out the rat's nest (if I may indulge in a silly '70s-style badass-type metaphor.)

I'm going to step back into my Nombre Falso-influenced conception of the text as the scene of the crime and the critic as detective. (After all, a reader always has the opportunity to play amateur critic, that is detective.) Here's my theory about the novella in Haunted. Palahniuk breaks out with Fight Club, but his particular style and transgressive subject matter don't sit well with many mainstream critics. The movie of said book is accused of fascism, misogyny, etc. Then, even though he's a fairly successful author, with each book some previously positive critics start to wonder if he's a one-trick pony. It all culminates with the Salon review of Diary and Palahniuk's own heated response. So, he knocks out this novella about critics locking themselves away in a pique of anger, then sets it aside. A little later, when his agent suggests that a collection of short stories won't sell, Palahniuk takes out the novella, tweaks it (perhaps in more than one sense of the word) for a week, slaps that puppy together, and bam! the freshest voice of this generation reinvents the horror genre!(/sarcasm)

Well, I should probably describe what exactly it was about the novella that so frustrated me. Aside from the general laziness, the frequent errors, the one-dimensionality of the characters, well, yes, aside from those minor things, the novella doesn't work because it's central concept, the brilliant satiric take on modern society, appears to have been devised by somebody who is only familiar with contemporary American society by reading about it second-hand in an article that was published in Mayan hieroglyphs before being translated to German and then to whatever language it is Palahniuk reads in. The main characters end up locked in an abandoned theater by an old man who believes they have promised to write something brilliant. They decide that they want to become famous by concocting a story that they were kidnapped and tortured. So, they go about sabotaging everything, mutilating themselves, ruining the food supply so they start to starve, etc. The idea is that they'll go to any lengths to become famous and that the more they've suffered, the more famous they'll become.

OK, these characters are cynical enough to not care what they have to do to achieve fame. At the same time, their idea that being victims will make them famous bears little to no reflection to the way celebrity works in the real world. (Yes, I'm familiar with the idea that people are caught up in claiming victimization. You know how edgy that critique is. It's so edgy that it was the subject of a cheesy Edward Burns movie five years before Haunted came out.) I frankly can think of next to nobody who has become a celebrity by undergoing some ordeal and certainly nobody who has become wealthy. I've read accounts of survivors of mining disasters, terrorist bombs, etc. who came out heroes. They never get rich. The best adjusted ones put it behind them and move on with their lives. Being the survivor of something terrible is pretty useless as a way to become rich and famous. Yet, these characters are simultaneously deeply cynical and completely stupid. Palahniuk describes his intent with these characters thus: "In my horror, I want to deal with personal humiliation and failure – a kind of internal monster, where the villain and victim are the same person". But these people aren't villains by any stretch of the imagination. They're just future Darwin Awards Nominees. There's nothing edgy or revelatory about watching them knock against each other for twenty-four chapters. They tell us nothing about humanity, about society, about our place in the cosmos. Horror fiction can and has done that, but not this story.

I came back to Haunted because I had picked it up at a time when I was trying to stretch my reading beyond just genre. This seemed to go one step beyond. And when I found it not entirely pleasant, I thought perhaps there were depths there I was too simple to plumb. It in a way helped drive me to seek out more fiction, to investigate the Gothic genre, to see what Palahniuk was trying to say and what was important about it. I now feel I can say there are no redeeming features to this novella. It's hackwork, pure and simple.

I still think most of the stories are pretty good. (Which feels an almost weirdly mild thing to write after so venting my frustration at the novella.) Skip the "poetry," though.

Having got that all off my chest, it's nice to turn to a writer who writes with skillful use of language, character, pacing, imagery, etc. The Sundial is one of Jackson's lesser-known works, so I expected it to be sort of a let-down after the brilliant We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I admit it's not quite as unnerving, but this is still brilliant fiction, the kind that just sort of makes you marvel.

In The Sundial, twelve characters wait for the end of the world in an old house, which is supposed to keep them safe until they can stride out into the new Eden. The characters are varied. Some have blood ties to the builder of the house, others seem to arrive by accident. The novel isn't so much about the end of the world (which appears imminent at the end of the novel, though even then it is left ambiguous) or even the preparations (though those are touched on) but with the way this prophecy and the end of the world changes the dynamics between the characters, exposing their petty ambitions and vanities, the fissures of class, gender and age.

The novel maintains sort of a quietly weird atmosphere, compounded by the eccentricities of the characters. The tension builds almost imperceptibly, sometimes broken by moments of humor (especially one brilliant scene where the matriarch of the house meets with a Heaven's Gate-style cult who are also planning for the end of the world) and heightened by confrontations.

As with much of Jackson's work, it can often seem that what's going on at the surface is trivial, yet over the whole narrative one gets the sense that there is some greater, potentially deadly struggle going on beneath the light banter. Her stories sometimes recall Kafka-style paranoia but they are deeply grounded in domesticity, in a way taking the Gothic duality of "house" as building and "house" as family/line and placing it squarely within contemporary notions of home and family. It's a captivating achievement that only a loopy genius could achieve.

Oops, forgot to mention that's not the real cover for the version of The Sundial that I read. I had read the library's version, which has a plain hard cover. So, I just picked out the one I like best from the ones people uploaded.

One observation I neglected to mention. Haunted and The Sundial have some interesting parallels in that they involve groups of people trapped in a house, vying with each other for control, and that both novels can be read as satires on contemporary society.

Well, Haunted grabs you by the collar and screams, "YOU MUST READ ME AS SATIRE; I HAVE SIMPLY BRILLIANT THINGS TO SAY ABOUT LOTS OF STUFF!" The Sundial works as a simple story of characters interacting in an eerie environment, it's social observations just under the surface for the more ambitious reader. I've already babbled enough about Palahniuk, so I'll just leave it at that.


71. Viaje Olvidado by Silvina Ocampo - finished 9/28/10

I was going to start with an analogy about Argentine fiction as the Superfriends, with Borges as Superman, Bioy Casares as Batman, and Silvina Ocampo as Wonder Woman. Then I realized the whole thing didn't make a lick of sense. ("Man, there ain't no blind Superman, man.")

This was Ocampo's first published books, a collection of very short stories set in various locations in Argentina. Childhood is a frequent subject, often told from the point of view of the children within, and Ocampo captures a certain amount of the mystery and confusion of being a child especially in the ways adults fail to communicate with them when things go wrong. Other stories concern every day life in the cities of Argentina, though sometimes with a peculiar twist. Since this was published in 1937, I'm not sure where it fits into the "magical realism" tradition, but there is sometimes a sense of a coexistence of realistic and fantastic elements.

Overall, I thought these were quite good, sometimes sort of tragic, with some interesting characters, and a sort of sense of the magical about them.

72. The Painted Darkness by Brian James Freeman - finished 10/1/10

I received this novella as part of LT's Early Reviewer's program, knowing little about it except that it involved a painter whose paintings feature dark themes associated with something that happened to him, which he himself does not remember but that there appears to be some hint of the supernatural about it. The story is told along two tracks, each covering one wintry day in the life of the painter.

In the present day, he is alone in the isolated farmhouse that he lives in with his wife and child. He is trying to paint, though he finds it difficult. The other track is a flashback to a different snowy day when the painter was a young boy and the experience that he had which changed him. Since it's such a short work, I can't really get much farther into it without getting into spoilers.

Overall, I liked the story. I thought it was fairly well told, with some moments that were spooky. I approached it as a horror story, but despite those few moments, I didn't find it all that scary. I'd say it's more of a modern dark fairy tale. I could see recommending this to someone who doesn't normally read horror.


73. Cuentos Completos 2 by Julio Cortázar - finished 10/1/10

The first volume in this series--Cuentos Completos 1--is easily one of my favorite books, which I would rank alongside Borges' Ficciones and Arlt's El jorobadito as exemplars of the Argentine short story (or, heck, short stories in general). The second volume shows Cortázar stretching somewhat from his earlier work, starting with the book of Cronopios y Famas, which tend towards the experimental and abstract to an almost Borgesian extent. The books that follow show Cortázar refining his surrealist/stream-of-consciousness style, often to good use.

Overall, I have to admit I didn't enjoy this volume as I did the first. I confess, though, that the fault may be mine more than Cortázar's. The stories are just more challenging than those of his earlier works, the memorable elements that gave stories such as "Axolotl" and "Casa tomada" such a kick seem more subdued or concealed. There's still some real gems in this volume, both of the realistic and fantastic varieties, and I think Cortázar's willingness to keep pushing himself as a writer is admirable. For now, I'll just leave it that I preferred the first volume, but hopefully when I get a chance to revisit this one, I might reconsider that.

Book started: El milagro y otros cuentos
Category: Short Story Collections
Possible overlaps: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan

A sort of "Best of..." Enrique Anderson Imbert's short fiction. I'll just quote the back:

As well as being a prestigious literary critic, Enrique Anderson Imbert is, also, due to the magnitude of his works, one of the more interesting story tellers of Argentina. His texts reflect, one the one hand, the subtle play of intelligence, humor and ingenuity that immediately captures the attention of the reader; on the other hand, they demonstrate the philosophical inquietude and vast culture of their author.

Book Started: Vestigios
Category: Cien años de senderos que bifurcan
Possible overlaps: Mouldering Castles and Doomed Lines

Picked this up in Buenos Aires on a whim, based pretty much on the description on the back:

• An ancestral book which reveals the secrets of life, pharmacopeia, and the resurrection of the dead, known to initiates as Gnosis Hermeticum...
  
• A sorcerer in colonial Buenos Aires, searching through Jesuit catacombs...
  
• A young astronomy student, investigating the disappearance of his father during the era of the Triple A...
  
• Antieler, the controller, able to make fears into reality...
  
• And Alethia, dominating it all from the shadows for a thousand years...

Life and death are only two stations on an infinite road...

I don't know if this book will be any good, but it sure sounds like it has a high potential to be nutty!

@Vestigios: Either that or a really bad take on a South American Da Vinci code :)

Either that or a really bad take on a South American Da Vinci code

So true!, but I think it's fair to say that Da Vinci Code would have been greatly improved with some resurrection of the dead or at least a little advanced pharmacopoeia...

Quick note on Vestigios:

So far, the novel seems to have subplots which take place in different eras. One of these is the story of the sorcerer in colonial Buenos Aires. That story begins with his arrival in BsAs in 1803, where he is harassed by customs, accused of bringing in contraband, and asked for a bribe. After he manages to get through that, he hires a wagon and driver to take him to his new residence in the southern part of the city.
The driver mentions that Customs haraaes pretty much anyone, the sorcerer laments that the Old World is exporting its worst aspects, and the driver responds:

"Get used to it. The only thing we don't lack for here are rats and dogs and their human equivalent."

That's only a few profanities away from the sort of thing a modern Buenos Aires cabdriver would say to a newcomer. I confess I do wonder if I should be put off by a potential anachronism, but there's something wonderfully Arltesque about it.

74. Rayuela by Julio Cortázar - finished 10/5/10

I started Rayuela as something of a skeptic. Though I'm a huge Cortázar fan and have a high tolerance for pomo antics, I'd heard from some people that this novel is just hard to take, in part because the characters are rather insufferable. Also, I'd already picked it up once or twice, read a chapter or two, and felt really lost. But I decided to just jump for it, even deciding that I was going to read it the more difficult way, and keep going until the book got good ore frustration sent in.

A quick note on the book, in case any of the above was confusing. Rayuela is written in 155 chapters, separated into three different sections. The reader is presented with two different ways of reading this novel. He or she can opt to start on chapter 1 and then read until chapter 56. These encompass the major events of the novel, told in consecutive order. Alternatively, the reader can choose to "hopscotch," jumping around among the 155 chapters in a scheme outlined on the introduction page. Some chapters are just a few lines, a quote from a poem, a song, a secondary character, an encyclopedia entry, etc.

In the hands of a less masterful author, the whole thing would be a frustrating mess, and I confess that it did take me several chapters to really get into the story. The writing, as can be expected from Cortázar, is simply brilliant and the depth of the novel simply moving on many levels. Yes, the main character, Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine Bohemian living in Paris, is not the most likable or heroic of figures. He reminded me quite a bit of Jack Kerouac: intelligent and sensitive, frustrating in his sense of detachment to life and people, and yet someone whose spiritual hunger is all too real to dismiss.

Rayuela is very much not a book for someone looking for an easy read. As with much of Cortázar's fiction, it sometimes feels like an attempt to plumb the farthest reaches of consciousness or reality using the tools of fiction, something that can make it deeply unsettling, confusing, moving, even sublime, depending on the reader's interaction with the story. There was a moment after I really got into the story, when I found myself thinking that reading it straight versus reading it hopscotch-style didn't just result in two different approaches to the same book, but in fact yielded two different books with quite different meanings. Then I had to ask myself, what if I came up with a completely different approach, say reading all of the even numbered chapters first, or reading it all from chapter 155 to chapter 1. How many different novels were contained in this one book? It's probably an unanswerable question, but it is that ability to get you thinking along those lines that represents part of what can be so exciting about reading Cortázar.


75. El milagro y otros cuentos by Enrique Anderson Imbert - finished 10/9/10

Because Enrique Anderson Imbert occupies a somewhat similar space as Cortázar, of fiction with a high degree of philosophical content, it could have been a let down to follow up the latter with the former. However, Anderson Imbert's style and approach is different enough that I found them quite enjoyable. One strong characteristic of AI's stories is an element of irony, along the lines of O. Henry or Max Beerbohm.

The stories are all relatively short, some brief enough to count as flash fiction or prose poetry. There's a pretty good handling of philosophical themes, perhaps not quite as mind bending as in the works of Borges or Cortázar, but with intelligence and a sense of humor. Come to think of it, this was a nice relief after Rayuela, not nearly as heavy, but not fluffy either.

I think it's fair to say that Da Vinci Code would have been greatly improved with some resurrection of the dead or at least a little advanced pharmacopoeia...

Then again, that's true for almost any book! ;-)

76. Vestigios by Marcelo G. Urbano - finished 10/19/10

I wouldn't call Vestigios a weird novel--there's nothing all that baffling or surreal about it in terms of structure or language--but it certainly is peculiar. Though its publication year of 2007 suggests that the success of DaVinci Code may have helped it find its way to a printer, it doesn't read anything like a DaVinci knockoff.

First of all, no Templars. The hidden cult is made up of alchemists and is called Alethia, which is Greek for "the way of truth." I'm not sure if there's any historical basis for it, or if Urbano just made it up. Second, nobody is interested whether Jesus had kids, was a human being, traveled to America or built the Pyramids. Lastly, it's not written like a thriller. Thrillers tend to go with short chapters, lots of cliff-hangers, anything to keep the pages turning. The action here jumps around so much, from the 1589 to 1805 to 1975 to 1986, that you don't get that same level of suspense. Overall, I'm not sure what sort of genre you could peg this novel into, and perhaps that question isn't really that useful.

The story concerns a book called the Gnosis Hermeticum, produced by a group of alchemists, then lost and sought after by various groups. The book is taken from Spain to Argentina, where it is again concealed or lost. Later, another alchemist, who has escaped Napoleonic France, arrives in Buenos Aires to seek it out. In 1975, an academic by the name of Ramon Biasutto finds evidence that the book exists, and in seeking it out ends up coming to the attention of Jose Lopez Rega, an astrologer and sort of Rasputin to Juan and Isabela Peron. In 1986, Ramon's son, Hector, investigates his father's disappearance and also ends up on the trail of the book.

It's an interesting work, and, I'd argue, quite Argentine in its own unique way. Though Argentina is a Catholic country, hermetical/mystic thinking has often found fertile ground. Leopoldo Lugones was the most important national(-ist) poet of his generation, but his Las Fuerzas Extrañas concludes with "Ensayo de una cosmogonia en diez lecciones," a rather lengthy account of the formation of the universe, which appears to have been heavily influenced by Theosophy. Arlt himself published an essay titled "The Occult Sciences in the City of Buenos Aires," and his Los Siete Locos featured a terrorist who called himself "The Astrologer." And then Lopez Rega, who actually published works on astrology and was dubbed "El Brujo." I wouldn't say that Urbano's intent here is to tap into the connections between occult and political power and violence, but it definitely seems an interesting undercurrent of the novel.

77. Respiración Artificial by Ricardo Piglia - finished 10/20/10

My first exposure to Ricardo Piglia was Nombre Falso (item #40 up above). One reason I reread that work is because I often found myself equally fascinated as befuddled while reading it, as if I could tell the author had something to say which my brain was not grasping in its entirety. Unsurprisingly, I found rereading it earlier this year to be a very rewarding experience, as the familiarity helped me better concentrate on what exactly the author was saying.

Similarly, my first thought upon finishing Respiración Artificial was, "That was great. I should read it again right now." As with other works in this category, I find myself feeling lost at first, trying to figure out what kind of story this is supposed to be. Respiración, like Novela del Museo de la Eterna or Rayuela, never really settles into a conventional narrative, but one "tunes in" to the unconventional form so that some degree of clarity can be perceived.

Respiración begins as the story of a young man who converts an old family story into a novel which earns him a small degree of literary acclaim. (The young man, Emilio Renzi, describes it as "using the tone Faulkner acquires when translated by Borges, by which means the tale sounded more or less like a parody of Onetti.") The story concerns the marriage of his uncle, a young lawyer, with a young woman of notable and wealthy family. The marriage ends rather abruptly, and shortly thereafter the uncle is sent to prison under allegations of having stolen from his ex. Based on the success of the book, the uncle, now well into middle age, contacts the narrator. They correspond a little, the young man describing his literary aspirations, and the uncle telling of his work regarding a man named Enrique Ossorio, who was a confidante of Juan Manuel Rosas, the 19th century strongman who was Argentina's first dictator.

The narrative fractures somewhat from here. The narrator, at the uncles request, visit's the father of his uncle's ex. Some of the story is taken up with a series of letters, some of them clearly Ossorio's, and somebody's notes (the uncle's? Emilio's?) about the potential for coded messages in those letters. Finally, the uncle invites Renzi out to his home in one of the provinces of Argentina, and the narrator makes his journey out there.

When he arrives, the uncle is gone, apparently gone on a trip, but Renzi meets up with Tardewski, an aged Polish academic who has lived in exile since the start of WWII. The last section of the narrative is largely taken up by their conversation on the very long night when they wait for the return of the uncle. This conversation is quite fascinating and even involves an intriguing fictional theory linking Hitler with Kafka.

Though I ended up deciding not to reread it, I did ponder the thought seriously for a little while, and it is likely I will be returning to this book next year.

78. Weird Tales (Vol. I) by E.T.A. Hoffmann - finished 10/23/10

E.T.A. Hoffmann was a German Gothic/Romantic writer whose work influenced Poe, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and others. There were several works and collections of his available as free e-books, and I chose this one because, well, the title fit with the category, and I hoped this collection would encompass the most macabre/eerie of the author's works.

There are some good works in here, such as the effectively creepy "The Sandman" and the rather melancholy "The Cremora Violin." "The Entail" also had an interesting supernatural element, but the story seemed a bit lacking overall. Other tales, such as "Signor Formica" and "Arthur's Hall," were entertaining but lacking much in the way of weirdness.

Weird Tales is divided into two volumes, and I was originally going to read both of them. However, after reading the first volume, I found the second one something of a chore. Hoffmann isn't a bad writer, but the stories often have these very archaic structures where they seem to spend the first third setting up the characters and history. This combined with a less-than-expected element of creepy elements finally made me give up on the second volume partway into the second story. I'll probably return to it at some point, but for the moment, it's nice to move on.

79. Usher's Passing by Robert McCammon - finished 10/27/10

Although the cover may look properly seasonal, there's really no Halloween connection to the book. What attracted me to Usher's Passing was the name. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was only the second Poe story I ever read ("The Tell-Tale Heart" being the first) and it made quite an impression on me. The description on the back describes the premise for the story as one where the Usher line has continued and grown prosperous, though still concealing dark secrets.

Generally, I think this kind of literary sequel or homage quite tricky. (See my comments on Barker's "The New Murders in the Rue Morgue" above, or my review of Mr.X in which Straub fails attempt at Lovecraft homage goes awry.) The first chapter of the novel starts things on a strong note, presenting a fascinatingly sinister picture of one of the Usher clan as he confronts Edgar Allan Poe over his writing of a story about the family. Poe swears he thought it was purely fiction, that perhaps he heard about them second-hand and subconsciously worked the family into a story he thought he had dreamed up.

It sets the tone well, making it clear that while connected to Poe's story, McCammon intends to make Usher's Passing his own story, his own take on the old Gothic tale of a doomed family line. From there, events leap forward to the present day. Rix Usher is called back to the family home near Asheville, North Carolina, by his father, Walen, who is dying from a hereditary terminal illness which enhances the senses of its victims. The family fortune extends back to the middle of the 19th century, when they got into the business of weapons manufacturing. Now, they possess a large estate in the mountains of North Carolina, dominated by a large, though unused, mansion they call The Lodge.

At home, Rix has to contend with his mother Margaret, who is in denial regarding her husband's impending demise: his arrogant brother Boone and his fading Southern Belle of a wife; and his sister Katt, who resents his abandonment of the family. Rix's latest novel has been rejected by his publisher, and his return inspires thoughts about writing the Usher family history. While delving into the old documents in the library, he begins to uncover secrets and mysteries of the family. Meanwhile, what do all the legends of an evil presence in the hills around the family estate mean, of the Pumpkin Man and his sinister feline companion Greediguts, who the locals blame for the disappearances of children in the area?

I especially liked how McCammon handled the Poe element. Poe's presence is certainly felt, from little story details to the climax of the book, but done with a light enough touch that it doesn't feel smothered by allusion. McCammon both captures the traditional Gothic feel of the doomed family and the sinister structure whose shadow may as well be the shadow of their own crimes, but gives it a decided modern and Southern twist. In fact, sometimes I was reminded of Faulkner, and those families which made their fortunes off the blood of slaves yet have gained the illusion of gentility thanks to their wealth and endurance.


80. Neverland by Douglas Clegg - finished 10/30/10

As I've mentioned before, there's some risk to reading similar works close together. Neverland also wraps its contemporary horror around a Southern Gothic tale, and it's also clever enough to steal from its literary predecessors without having to call attention to said borrowings. However, I found it to be a little bit of a comedown after Usher's Passing.

Neverland is told from the point of view of Beau, a 10-year old boy, on vacation with his family on the South Carolina peninsula known as Gull Island. Also on the island are his aunt, uncle and cousin, as well as his grandmother who lives there. Sumter, his cousin, is approximately the same age as Beau, but is the sort of kid that would likely get picked on in elementary school. He is withdrawn, yet bratty, often living in his own imagination, and still carries a teddy bear around.

He does claim to have made an important discovery in an old shed near the grandmother's house. He calls this realm "Neverland" and claims it is ruled over by Lucy, who he keeps in a crate and describes as a god. Soon, Beau and his two older sisters are drawn into increasingly sinister "games," led by Sumter.

Despite much that was done well, the novel didn't really capture me until it neared the climax. The way Sumter is written is a little off. He seems like he should be alternately creepy and pitiful, a weird little boy who lives largely in his own imagination. However, I just found him too irritating to be a very compelling character. Additionally, the middle section dragged somewhat. Sumter likes to talk a lot about Neverland and contrast it with the adult world of lies and disappointment, but this got a little too repetitive.

Overall, I enjoyed it and thought it was a pretty smart novel, despite its flaws.

Usher's Passing is one of my favorite McCammon novels. Thanks for the excellent review!

81. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - finished 11/7/10

The Gothic is a curious category in fiction. It's historically linked to genre fiction (predominantly horror) without really qualifying as a genre itself. Its sometimes outlandish tropes can seem at odds with the sort of realism usually associated with "serious" literature, yet I would argue those tropes reflect real issues and concerns that it makes sense for literature to deal with. I suspect that Gothic fiction's liminal quality (its "neither fish nor fowl" nature) is one of the factors that makes me such as a big fan of it. It often feels like a back door into literature for me, a weird subterranean tunnel connecting two such dissimilar works such as Wuthering Heights and Usher's Passing.

I can think of plenty of good reasons for me to have read Rebecca, from its mystery and romance to its portrayal of the social mores of upper-crust Cornwall, but I may never have picked it up had I not seen it compared with Jane Eyre. Though they are imperfect, there are strong parallels in the story of the young woman who falls in love with a rich older man and after moving into the large palatial home, finds that the home and man hold certain secrets.

From the narrator's first description of her dreams of Manderlay (the palatial home), the story had me hooked. I'm fascinated by the way that houses figure in Gothic fictions, often creepily ambiguous in their nature of shelter versus prison. The English sometimes refer to things as "safe as houses," but Gothic houses (and mansions and castles) subvert that simple association. I was thinking recently about the current mortgage/foreclosure crisis, and how the bubble was inflated in part because so many believed that not only was purchasing a home a safe investment but even part of their patriotic duty, only to find, like the protagonists of Gothic tales, that a house is often a trap. (Sorry to go on a tangent there, but that's been kicking around in my head for a little while, and it finally had to come out.) Du Maurier paints Manderlay as a sort of lost paradise, an almost sublime realm across which a shadow has fallen.

The narrator is an orphan who meets Maxim de Winter while she is working in Monte Carlo as a wealthy woman's assistant/companion. Though they occupy much different social spheres, Maxim takes an immediate interest in her, and after only a few weeks together, he proposes marriage. After their honeymoon, the couple returns to the family home of Manderlay, where the narrator has to make the adjustment to being lady of the house. This is complicated by the history of the first Mrs. de Winter. Though dead for over a year, her presence hovers over the house. The new Mrs. de Winter is often reminded of how much more beautiful, intelligent and accomplished her predecessor was in conversation, while other conversations on the same subject (especially with Maxim) yield strange silences. Worst of all is Mrs. Danvers, who runs the house and makes little effort to hide the fact that she sees the narrator as an interloper. Du Maurier creates a very palpable sense of how the spirit of Rebecca haunts Manderlay, not supernaturally, but in the way the past can linger on in the present, distorting our ability to perceive and maneuver in the world in front of us.

Though I read it slowly at first, once the novel reached the last part, I was so engrossed in the action that I ended up reading in marathon sessions, finally staying up until 2:00 am to finish it. And to push past exhaustion through that tense final section to that ending (which I won't reveal), well, that is quite an experience!

After reading your great review I need to see if I can work Rebecca into my 11 in 11 challenge or slip it in as a non-challenge read for this year..... Hummmmm

Finally got around to reviewing The Eyre Affair, which I read last year . There were some points I didn't get into to try to keep the review cohesive, but among them was a comparison with the more sophisticated metatextual play of Jorge Luis Borges and Ricardo Piglia. Somehow, this led me to ponder a Thursday Next version of The Falklands War in which the Argentines us their superior metatextual technology to sow fear and confusion among the Brits, thus allowing them to emerge triumphant. And while some degree of pride for my native land does give the idea some appeal, the fact is that the Falklands are not nor likely will ever be any sort of national treasure, but (more importantly) the idea of the thugs who ran the country in 1982 having access to such powerful technology is rather unsettling.

Not really related to anything I'm reading right now, but I didn't know where else to share this random idea.

#166 - Cool, hope you enjoy it as much I did. Wow, an 11-11 challenge? That makes my head spin a little. The 10-10 has been a real stretch so far for me, so I'm not sure what I'll be doing next year.

@167 Interesting. Just curious: Is this an idea spawning from The eyre affair (I haven't read any Fforde at all), or how does it relate? Why would such a scanario be a "Thursday Next version"? I was under the impression her world was one populated by characters from books?

It is sort of extrapolated from The Eyre Affair, which is the first in what I would call the "Thursday Next" books (as she is the main character in all of them). That one isn't really populated with characters from other books, but I think that changes somewhat in the sequels. I haven't read past the first, so I can't say exactly. The premise for Affair is that the action takes place in an alternate England of 1985, which is still fighting the Crimean and where classic English lit enjoys some widespread near-obsessive fandom. One character invents a device that allows travel to and from works of fiction or poetry. The another character steals it and uses it to kidnap characters from classic works and hold them for ransom, because if they get kidnapped and killed off from the original manuscript, then it impacts all printed copies of that work. (I don't know if this description makes it sound temptingly loopy or just stupid, but the more I think about the novel, the more my opinion drifts towards the second option.)

I'm not sure where the whole Falklands idea originated from exactly. Perhaps from the idea of "the text as the scene of the crime*," which is my way of stating one of the ideas I got from Piglia's Assumed Name, or possibly because Borges' Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote is, like, a million times better than Affair.

*A phrase which I think I adapted from Inception's tag line: "Your mind is the scene of the crime."

82. Aquí Vivieron by Manuel Mujica Láinez - finished 11/15/10

One thing I've noticed while getting acquainted with Gothic literature is the way themes and elements mutate as they cross national/cultural boundaries, such as in the differences between American and English Gothic tales. This got me wondering about the Gothic in Argentine literature. There are already some suspects in this matter, since Edgar Allan Poe's influence includes key authors such as Horacio Quiroga, Leopoldo Lugones, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Still, it was not until about a third of the way into Aquí Vivieron that it occurred to me that Mujica Lainez has a marked Gothic sensibility. Though Aquí is a short-story collection, the stories are centered around a specific location--a home in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro--and are strongly linked. The first story takes place in the 17th Century, telling of one slave's escape from the ship on which she has been held captive, and her encounter with the indigenous people of what will become Buenos Aires. From there, stories trace the development of the humble shack to a palatial estate, as it becomes home first to impoverished immigrants and later to a wealthy family. We follow the happenings in and around this house until it's final destruction in 1924.

The importance of the house is not the only Gothic element. The stories are often rather dark, the fates of the characters determined by secrets they've sought to conceal or divine. Tragedies that take place in the stories are sometimes alluded to in later stories, creating the impression of the past hanging over the present. (The stories are largely realistic, though there are a couple of moments when the supernatural appears to intrude.)

I'd previously read MML's Misteriosa Buenos Aires, which takes a similar approach, tracing the history of Buenos Aires over 350 years and 42 short stories. I think I actually liked this one better. The focus on a single location gives it a greater focus, so this actually feels a little like a novel.

Book Started: Selected Poems, 1956-1968 - Leonard Cohen
Category: Poetry & Prose
Possible overlaps: None

I've been a little spotty on updating every time I start a new book, but I figured I'd throw this one up. I've been a fan of Leonard Cohen's music since college, where I was introduced to I'm Your Man by my first roommate. Well, fan of his music is not totally accurate. I won't defend the musicianship of his songs, and, yes, Cohen's voice is not beautiful by conventional standards. However, Cohen's voice (especially in his later work) reflects the longing, world-weariness, serenity, and irony that makes his lyrics so brilliant. So, while trying to decide what else to put in this category, I hit upon seeking out Cohen's poetry in my local library.

As the name states, this is a collection of poems from the beginning of his career until shortly before he first hit it big with "Suzanne." The first book of poetry covered is Let Us Compare Mythologies. Mythologies feels somewhat rawer/rougher than Cohen's later work, filtering his thoughts on God, sex and love through a vista of ancient battlefields and Hellenistic structures.

Book Started: A Dreamer and A Visionary
Category: What's Lovecraft Got to Do with It?
Possible overlaps: None

My local library doesn't have a copy of Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, so instead I opted for A Dreamer & A Visionary, which appears to emphasize HPL's relation the political, social and intellectual currents of his time.

83. A Dreamer and A Visionary by S. T. Joshi - finished 11/22/10

Reading this made me even more interested in reading either H.P. Lovecraft: A Life or I Am Providence, in part because I'm curious to what extent the material in this volume overlaps with either of those. Though there is quite a bit on Lovecraft's thinking on matters social, political, cultural and otherwise, it does seem to me that there is still quite a bit taken up by the more traditional biography material. (I would totally have been okay if Joshi had delved a little deeper into Lovecraft's views on, say, his literary contemporaries.)

What I found most interesting is that this book appears to have been written almost with L. Sprague de Camp's in mind, calling a couple of his theories directly into question and also alluding to previous critics or biographers who found fault with Lovecraft in ways that Joshi feels are unjustified. (Despite the vagueness, it's pretty clear that Joshi has de Camp in mind.)

Enjoyable bio, which mostly achieves what Joshi sets out in the introduction, but not the most complete by a stretch.


84. Selected Poems, 1956 - 1968 by Leonard Cohen - finished 11/23/10

Not really sure how to sum this work up. Some I quite liked, while others left me cold. I guess when they were good, they were quite striking, having the same intelligence and emotion as his music; however, sometimes they strike me as sort of opaque.

85. Tinieblas by Elias Castelnuovo - finished 11/28/10

I picked this book up in a Buenos Aires bookstore because the blurb on the back described Castelnuovo as the most important of the Grupo Boedo (Boedo Group) authors. The Boedo Group was a literary movement in early 20th-century (20s/30s) Buenos Aires which was influenced by social realism and Russian literature. They were mostly working class and left-leaning, and much of their creative effort went into literature which they hoped would spur some degree of social change. They are frequently contrasted with the Grupo Florida (Florida Group), whose members were middle class and more interested in literary experimentation for its own sake than for social purposes. (Boedo and Florida are both streets in BsAs, located in neighborhoods whose different economic status at the time you can probably guess from the contrast between the two groups.)

The time period and contrast would suggest that Boedo/Florida is somehow related to Arlt/Borges, and while it's easy to see how Arlt's own artistic ambitions and influences line up with Boedo (and likewise for Florida/Borges) neither of these two authors were really part of either group. It's more on an interesting, if confusing, parallel. Also, this way of talking about the two groups suggests a greater contrast than really existed. From what I've read, there were writers who considered themselves members of both groups.

Anyway, I couldn't resist the opportunity to explore this little bit of Argentine literary history I had previously heard of. There's a nice, short introduction which gets a little more into Castelnuovo's influences and the aim of his fiction. The stories themselves feature characters who occupy a pretty low strata of society, either orphans or with terrible parents, marginally employed or working under hellish conditions. There is at times an element of the surreal in the stories. Both thematically and in terms of language, the stories are reminiscent of Arlt, but what sets them apart is that the protagonists tend to be loyal, self-sacrificing, almost Christ-like. (Whereas Arlt's protagonists sometimes find a redemption of sorts in betrayal, which I guess makes them Judas-like.)

This was a slim volume with only four relatively short stories, which I thought quite powerful. There is a sort of constant misery, which might have made a larger volume a little difficult to get through.

86. Juan Moreira by Eduardo Gutierrez - finished 12/1/10

This work was originally serialized in the newspaper La Patria Argentina from 1879 to 1880, and is the account of the life, exploits and death of Juan Moreira, an outlaw gaucho killed in 1874. As with In Cold Blood or Piglia's Money to Burn, this is a nonfiction story told as a novel. I have not gotten a chance to dig into the veracity of the narrative, but Gutierrez declares at several points in the book that what he is writing is based on eyewitness accounts or other sources. For now, I'm willing to take his word for it. (I did Moreira's Wikipedia entry, but that tracks so closely with the novel, that I suspect that it's using the novel as a source.)

The book presents Moreira as a good man (hard working, considerate, not given to drinking excessively) who runs afoul of the law because Don Francisco, the local Deputy Mayor, feels jealous at his marriage to a woman Francisco was in love with. Moreira sees no other option but to arm himself and revenge himself on the DM, after which he becomes a fugitive from justice. Eventually, he comes to believe that he has no options left and gets into bloodier and bloodier confrontations with the authorities, finally leading to his death.

Despite Gutierrez' portrayal of Moreira as a good man, it was at times to maintain sympathy for him as he finds himself repeatedly in situations where he has to kill. After a while, though, I began to see Moreira as akin to a Ronin. Having been cut off from society, he feels too bound by a code of honor to allow an easy escape, so eventually whatever hope he has gives way to the fatalism of dying bravely. I could totally see Toshiro Mifune playing this character, and was reminded of a quote applied to his character in "Sanjuro," which could just as easily apply to Moreira:

You're too sharp. That's your trouble. You're like a drawn sword. Sharp, naked without a sheath. You cut well. But good swords are kept in their sheaths.

(And, yes, I realize that the gaucho is closer to the cowboy than to the samurai, but I saw "Yoijimbo" first, so to me the Man With No Name will always be Mifune.)
Anyway, I could totally see Mifune as Moreira:


The novel, while not as lyric as Martín Fierro, was pretty enjoyable. Apparently the novel was a big hit and was adapted for the theater, and then cinematically several times.

A few more thoughts on Juan Moreira:

I sort of got sidetracked up there with the whole Ronin comparison (which I still consider apt), so I ended up cutting short my observations about the novel w/in Argentine literature. I'm a little fascinated by the changing fortunes of the novel, since it does seem to have been quite popular when it first came out but has fallen out of favor. In fact, as of this moment, I appear to be the only person on LT in possession of a copy of said book, compared with 173 for Martin Fierro, 158 for Facundo, and 30 for El Matadero-La Cautiva. Certainly there are strong arguments to be made for each of these works.

I think something about the tale of Juan Moreira strikes me both as compelling on its own and also interesting for its importance in Argentine culture. I've already discussed the way my feelings about Moreira changed throughout the course of the novel, and as I've had time to look back over the novel, I notice that there's something sort of admirable if tragic about Moreira and his willingness to refuse to give up no matter that it means that his doom is sealed.

On another level, this work strikes me as very much in line with other concepts of the gaucho and the Argentine character. While listening to tangos over the last couple of days, I sometimes thought that the more melancholy of them seemed to share the same sense of fatalism as Moreira. I think there's a definite kinship between the compadritos of Borges' fiction and the gaucho as exemplified by Moreira.

87. Sombras, nada mas by Antonio Di Benedetto - finished 12/15/10

Fallen behind here on updates, so I'm going to be brief. Sombras (shadows) seem to stand as metaphor for dreams, and there are dreams interwoven into the narrative about a poet who becomes a journalist and finds himself struggling with how to make the best of his career, attempting to balance idealism versus practicality, plus his own romantic entanglements.


88. Hint Fiction by Robert Swartwood - finished 12/21/10

Hint fiction is the label used to describe stories of less than 25 words. I'm actually rereading this one, because I'm not quite sure what to think about it. I feel that there'something fragile about stories this brief. Some seem poetic in how they suggest much with so little, while others don't quite work. Either they seem sort of mundane or they leave me feeling like, well, that's a great opening line, but where's the story. To what extent this has to do with my own state of mind when reading a story is one of the questions that intrigues me and part of the reasons I think there's a fragility to this type of story.


89. Mr. George and Other Odd Persons by August Derleth - finished 12/21/10

I picked this up (at a bookstore in Madison) because while it's weird fiction/horror, the stories are not Lovecraftian at all. What sort of horror writer is Derleth, I wondered, when he's not trying to be HPL? The stories were pretty good overall, though fairly tame. Derleth still has a bad habit of repeating the same plots in different iterations, and in this book a good 50 - 60% of the stories are some variation on "revenge from beyond the grave." The strongest element may have been the personal one, and what struck me most about the stories is how frequently and how well Derleth expresses the sense of the lonely child forced to rely on his/her own imagination for solace.


90. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman - finished 12/22/10

I'd read this book (or at least parts) in high school, when our philosophy class was studying time. I remembered it as a set of dreams/thought experiments about the possible different ways time could flow. This is, to some extent, true, though I think Lightman is much more interested in the relationship between humanity and how we perceive time.