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Bloguest 2016 | My Favourite Re-Reads – An Overthinking Teen

First off, a big thank you to Kayleigh for letting me guest post on her blog, one of the very first ones I ever followed! Bloguest was awesome last year and I’m so happy to be able to participate again :). Now, down to business… Unlike a fair few of my friends, I’m definitely the kind of person who will happily reread a book, often multiple times. Rereadability is actually how I decide which…

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My stack of books I’ve read to review has been growing for way too long, so another of these posts is needed. Some of these I read weeks ago now, so consider all these ratings fairly arbitrary. A few of these deserve their own, full-length reviews. Oh well. I have a life sometimes.

 Rick Moody – The Omega Force (2007)

The guy at Logan Square’s Uncharted Books recommended this to me. I’ve never read any Rick Moody before, but he did write The Ice Storm, which became a pretty good Ang Lee film I watched when I had food poisoning or something. The Omega Force is a trio of novellas that flirt with the mystery genre in different ways. There’s a drunk old guy who thinks his golf resort is being invaded by foreign nationals, an office worker trying to discover who has been leaving nasty comments in the suggestion box, and a reporter trying to get to the bottom of a mind-altering drug in post-apocalyptic America.

That all sounds entertaining, and it can be, but here Moody seems content to borrow from different writers here (mainly Pynchon, Wallace, and Dick) rather being original. It’s okay I guess, but this one is going back to the book store (Rating: C+).

B.S. Johnson - Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973)

B.S. Johnson doesn’t seem very well known in the United States and that’s a shame. The British novelist wrote a few experimental and ground-breaking novels in the 60s and 70s before taking his own life in 1973. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry isn’t particularly experimental in comparison to House Mother Normalor The Unfortunates, though it does call attention to its status as a novel numerous times, but it is incredibly funny.

After learning the double-entry system of book keeping, the titular character starts living his life this way. For every affront society throws at him, no matter how minor, he takes his revenge. This starts small with stealing from his company to calling in random bomb threats, then quickly escalates to terrorism and mass murder. Incredibly funny stuff for those with a taste for dark humor (Rating: B+).

Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye (1930)

Nabokov’s fourth novel, and the earliest of his I’ve read thus far, has an interesting concept, but a lame follow through. After the man he cuckolds beats him up, Smurov tries to kill himself. He thinks he’s died and gone on to a purgatory where he essentially continues on living, thought it’s most likely him projecting a fantasy world onto the real world. Whether dead or not, that’s an interesting idea for a novel, but nothing much happens after that. At the very least, The Eye is not very long and does give some indications of greatness to come (Rating: C).

David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster (2005)

I really wish I had written a review for this after reading it. Oh well. In my opinion, Consider the Lobster is David Foster Wallace’s best essay collection. There’s really no filler, except for a short speech he made about Kafka, and so many of his best essays are featured. That includes the titular essay about the New England Lobster Festival and if lobsters can feel pain, a visit to a porn award show, riding John McCain’s campaign bus, and an exploration of conservative talk radio.

We also get “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” where Wallace recounts experiencing September 11 in Bloomington-Normal. This one really hits home since I spent four years there in college. Even the essays I haven’t named are great. Wallace is able to write reviews and essays about topics I don’t give a shit about and make it hilarious and fascinating.

Honestly, it’s horribly painful knowing I’ll never get to read anything new from him. What a brilliant man (Rating: A).

Samuel R. Delany – Babel-17 (1966)

Babel-17 is a pre-Dhalgren short pulpy sci-fi novel that manages to incorporate some light experimentation and philosophical discussions about language into standard space travel stuff. Poet Rydra Wong is tasked with breaking a code during a civil war only to find the code from the other side is actually a language that is so powerful it can influence thought. Among space battles and weird aliens and people with goofy names, Delany is able to experiment with sentence structure and page layout.

Babel-17 is fine and would stand well against an average Phillip K. Dick book; however, reading this after Dhalgren, which I still don’t know what to make of, I’m not that impressed (Rating: B-).

Haruki Murakami – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

This one also deserves its own review. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is Murakami’s follow up to 1Q84, a very successful and bloated mess. Following the pattern set after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami has returned with a shorter, more human work that will seem minor looking back, but still offers plenty to be interested in.

Here Murakami gets rid of the supernatural, weird, and even cats. There’s still a mystery, but it’s grounded in reality. As a teenager, Tsukuru Tazaki was inseparable from a group of friends. During college, though, they cut themselves off from him without explanation causing him years of grief. Now approaching forty and entering into a new relationship, he tries to find out exactly what happened and finally go on with his life.

Ironically, the “pilgrimage” takes up the smallest part of the book and it feels like a rush towards the oblique ending. Parts are too blunt, even for Murakami standards, and yet the whole manages to be wonderfully oblique and perhaps his most true and human yet. The art design is also exquisite. I’m hoping this signals a change in his writing rather than another bloated behemoth trying to recapture old magic (Rating: B).

Samuel Beckett – Molloy (1951)

Molloy is the first part of a loose trilogy of novels from experimental author/playwright Samuel Beckett. I had to read the second novel, Malone Dies, for a class in college without reading this one. While not an easy read, Molloy is much more accessible than Malone Dies, though at the same time that made it seem less powerful to me.

Constructed in two halves, the first has Molloy recalling his time as a vagrant, wandering around on his bicycle and encounter weird people and doing things like running over a woman’s dog and then going to live with her. It’s deeply strange and quite funny at times. For readers, the only real difficulty is the incredibly long paragraphs that seldom seem a break (it’s better to try to get through in as few sittings as possible).

In the second half, we get Moran, a detective sent to find Molloy. This gives a genre to ease the reader, but Moran seems to have a slipping grip on reality and likes to abuse his son. On the Brightside, there are frequent paragraph breaks! I can’t get into this section much for reasons of spoilers, though I can say the two sides ending up tying together in a very intriguing way.

I’m never sure what to rate a work by Beckett and I feel like I’d need to read this at least another time to get a firmer idea of it. I don’t know (Rating: B+).

Yukio Mishima – The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956)

When I went to Japan, I visited the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a beautiful Buddhist site build with gleaming gold leaf. Of course this wasn’t the original temple: that one was burned down by a crazy acolyte in the 1950s after it had stood since its creation in the 14th century.

Mishima’s novel fictionalized the life of the acolyte. Born ugly with a stutter, he grows up the poor son of a temple superior who constantly tells the boy about the beauty of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The boy, who grows up with a persecution complex, finally gets to see the temple, but doesn’t see the beauty of it. He goes on to seek the priesthood at the temple in hopes of unlocking that beauty.

His life gets far more disturbing during an encounter where an American GI has him walk across a woman’s stomach, causing a miscarriage. He develops a friendship with a cynical, nihilist guy with a clubfoot and this guy’s mind starts downhill till an event we all know is coming.

At times this book is incredibly disturbing, other times it drags partially because I’m an American with only a cursory knowledge of Buddhism. In this case, I also didn’t think the novel worked as well knowing what was in store for this guy. It might have been better if Mishima had left it out and just focused on this guy’s mental state. It was good, but didn’t click for me like some of his other books (Rating: B).

Georges Bataille – Story of the Eye (1928)

French transgressive erotica is so explicit and ridiculous that it’s amazing it came out in the 20s. The short novella follows an aristocratic narrator and his lover Simone’s absurd sexual acts, which include orgies, eggs, murder, bull testicles, and an eye. This will probably be one of the most insane things you’ve ever read, and it’s incredible for that reason. There’s absolutely no holding back here (Rating: A).