Science Fiction & Books and Literature & Personal Posted by christian h., 24 May 2007 11:03 am

Readers Anonymous

I have a problem. I am addicted to reading. Normally, I got things under control. I have policies: never order books - if I don’t find them in a store, they’ll have to wait. No libraries. Don’t read more than three books at once. Get enough sleep (together with work, this cuts down on reading a lot). But sometimes, I lose it. I become a binge reader. I’ll read one or more books a day. I won’t sleep much, I’ll forget about eating and I’m late in answering my email (seriously, when I was an undergraduate I sometimes didn’t eat anything but chocolate until I felt too weak to walk up the stairs, at which point I realized that was a bad idea). I discard all discretion - I won’t distinguish anymore between good books and bad, those worth reading and those only good to while away the hours on a transatlantic flight. Do you have similar problems? Then join me in Readers Anonymous. The last couple weeks, I have had an attack.
The first step is acceptance, so let me tell you what I am reading, get it all out in the open. The whole episode was set off by several of the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher - purely inspired by watching TeeVee. These books are pretty much for reading addicts with no sense for quality only, I suspect. In fact, by the third book, the self-pity and chauvinism of the hero will get on most peoples’ nerves, despite some pretty good one-liners. You can see I have no self-control, since I got through five already.

Desperate for better Science Fiction, I raced through Ken MacLeod’s outstanding Cosmonaut Keep (a must-read for all SciFi fans: space ships, god-like aliens, Area 51, an anarcho-syndicalist union of computer geeks called IWWWW and a revolution), and I’ve stacked up The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (how could a mathematician resist that title?), and some Kim Stanley Robinson (about whom The Constructivist is going to tell us more, I believe.)

Good friends gave me Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (strangely, I hadn’t read that before), and in other educational reading, I have After Theory by Terry Eagleton waiting around in some pile, just so next time I get into a debate with the lit-crit crowd I can at least pretend I know what I’m talking about. Or maybe I’m just looking for some funny put-downs from the guy who distinguished between Big Fish and Little Fish. I report, you decide.

I just finished Mike Davis’ Buda’s Wagon (a very well-researched and well-thought out history of the car bomb by one of the better observers of the social structure of modern cities) and am in the middle of Chris Hedges’ American Fascists (slightly scary investigation of the religious right, beautifully written as usual with Hedges) and am re-reading Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia (a classic interpretation of the class structure of Stalinist Russia for those who still think the Soviet Union was a socialist country or North Korea deserves “critical support” - and those who don’t.) Also in politics, I am looking forward to discussing Empire and the Bomb by Joseph Gershon with everybody (maybe I’ll post something about it once I’m through.) I am almost done with the Che Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson (currently not available from Amazon for no apparent reason - even our local Border’s had it.)

You can see I am in trouble. This bout of reading - and consequently the post - is what our MOJ would call “all over the place”. I need your help to get more organized before my brain develops into multiple readers. Or, you could feed the addict more goods. Recommend some more books, until the brain freezes.

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Responses to “Readers Anonymous”

  1. on 25 May 2007 at 6:25 am 1. Jams said …

    Hey, Chris Hedges’ book is on my table too, along with Against the Day (Pynchon).

    Right now I’m reading Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. Home Land is a work of fiction in the form of caustic updates written by the narrator to his high school alumni newsletter. Hilariously disturbing, brilliantly written and conceived. I’m sure I’ll finish it by the end of the day.

    Then I’ll see if I have the courage to pick up the Pynchon. Maybe later. This might not be the right time, but I don’t know if I can help myself. The cover is so white and empty, and certainly the title will induce me to hemorrhage brain cells for weeks to come. Do I really want to do that to myself? Probably.

  2. on 25 May 2007 at 6:29 am 2. Kiera PSI said …

    Honey, you’ve got nothing on me. I’ve already received more than 45 books from Amazon.com in 2007 and have read all but 5 of them. They’ll be done in another week. That does NOT count the books purchased in stores locally. Unfortunately, I don’t read much edifying or educational material. Most of it is pure guilty pleasure paranormal “romance”.

    I don’t watch much “teevee”, I leave that to the D-Man. I did watch a few of the Dresden Files, mostly because I had read the entire series, and actully enjoyed it. It was nice to read a book where the main character doesn’t think he’s all that, yet is. I was disappointed in the tube version, probably because they changed some of the female characters and radically changed “Bob the skull”. I think Bob have a stroke if he saw how he’d been portrayed. I hear another of my favorite series, The Blood Books by Tany Huff, has become a series on Lifetime. Sigh. I haven’t watched it yet, though I suppose I must check it out. The folks who have and have enjoyed it hadn’t read the books first, so it is my “duty” to determine if they’ve done them justice. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

  3. on 25 May 2007 at 6:33 am 3. Kiera PSI said …

    Oi, that will teach me to post at oh-god-thirty in the morning…typos abound. Sigh. Bob WOULD have and TanYA Huff, sorry. And yes, I did use the preview function first.

    I’ll go apply ice packs to my burning cheeks now.

  4. on 25 May 2007 at 6:53 am 4. christian h. said …

    Kiera, I’m glad to hear I am a paragon of reading-related self-control, relatively speaking. My mention of “self-pity” in relation to the Harry Dresden character in the books refers to his “oh no, someone I happen to know got into trouble, so it must be my fault” - thinking he often exhibits. On second thought, it’s nice to see someone take responsibility.

  5. on 25 May 2007 at 7:17 am 5. Kiera PSI said …

    Yes, well…a lot of it is RELATED directly to him, if not precisely his FAULT. He’s a pawn of higher powers as many protagonists are. It just takes him quite a while to get to the “oh crap, I’m just a stinking pawn” realization and stop blaming himself and let his friends take responsibility for choosing to remain with him once they’re well warned that they’re at “ground zero”, so to speak.

    Okay, I’m off to the deadly dull of collegium in the midst of summer break. This means I’ll be checking in frequently for posts and if I don’t find sufficient to keep me entertained I’ll be looking for someone to “re-trunk”. Be warned!

  6. on 25 May 2007 at 7:25 am 6. christian h. said …

    To add, I don’t even get SciFi channel. I watched one episode of the show on USA Network late at night and thought, hey. Wizard. Chicago. Wisecracking remarks. I gotta give those books a try.

  7. on 25 May 2007 at 10:29 am 7. James Killus said …

    Write more. Then you will become afflicted with “writer’s disease,” which manifests as judging everything by “could I have written that?” and “it would have been a better book if I’d written/edited it.”

    Eventually, with bad books, you hit the point where you realize that you are doing all the work that the writer should have done (okay, the guy in the book couldn’t possibly have known who Richard Feynman was in 1943, but he could have been reading stuff in Astounding, so maybe his memory is conflating later, oh, the hell with it) and so you realize that you might as well write some of your own stuff.

    And good books make you feel so unworthy that you just want curl up into a little ball, you might as well do that in bed, so then you get some sleep.

  8. on 25 May 2007 at 12:27 pm 8. JP Stormcrow said …

    Back with some book recs later tonight - but question - was everyone bitten as a kid? We did not really own many books, but Tuesday night was library night in our house, I generally got the max number allowed (basically on my own, choosing them by cover or who knows what - made for a rather ecelectic exposure)and I had usually read 1 to 3 by Wednesday morning.

    In my own three children, I have one who is a similar “flashlight under the covers” reader (I think she read the last Harry Potter in one big marathon session - I did the same for Dune), one who reads a lot, but is not a sleep-depriving maniac about it (he deprives himself of sleep for other pursuits.), and one who is much less engaged - my presumption is that these patterns will persist throughout their lives.

  9. on 25 May 2007 at 12:52 pm 9. spyder said …

    1. We admit we were powerless over reading and acquiring books—that our lives had become cluttered with stacks as our shelves overflow, layers of books appended and annotated with post-its hanging like the pregnant chads
    .
    2. We must come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves might restore us to some degree of self control and sanity.

    3. We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of other activities as we understand them, and not to Amazon, Powells, and Daedalus.

    4. We force ourselves to complete a moral inventory of ourselves, and not our book inventories, or our pending book orders, lists, or casual book shopping.

    5. We admit to Amazon and Borders, that our human beingness requires us to state the exact nature of our wrongful book addictions.

    6. We acknowledge what we must no longer entirely entirely care about all the defects of authors, editors, illustrators, collectors, reviewers, critics, et al.

    7. Humbly we ask one another to remove our desperation to read yet one more review that will create the overwhelming desire within us to get more books.

    8. We make a list of all books we still have in our collections, swearing that before we purchase more, we shall judge what we have and determine if we can sell them or give them away: harmed or unharmed, written in or highlighted, stained or unstained, bookjacketed or tagged and dog-eared.

    9. We must make direct appeals to such people wherever possible to help us not collect and read more books today.

    10. We will continue to take inventory in ours, and others, collections and try not to compare, realizing that size and substance do not matter, except as otherwise annotated in the margins.

    12. Having had this spiritual re-awakening (by recognizing that there is no step eleven as there is no number in counting other than three) to the suffering created by our desire to nothing so much else as read yet another book, at this very moment, we choose to ignore all of these steps and pick up that next volume, sitting right there, begging us to open it and read.

  10. on 25 May 2007 at 1:12 pm 10. James Killus said …

    but question - was everyone bitten as a kid?

    I’m pretty sure it was earlier than that.

  11. on 25 May 2007 at 2:21 pm 11. Jams said …

    I don’t think I’m that much of a book junkie really. If something hasn’t caught me full force after a chapter, I put it down and never pick it up again. I only read about 15 non-work related books a year, Harpers every month, sometimes the New Yorker, and a daily dose of news and varied articles. I know a lot of bookafiles, and they’ll down 40 works of fiction a year pretty easy. Is that too much? I dunno. When is it too much?

    I started reading in earnest when I was about eight. I used to buy trashy novels from the convenience store. They only cost marginally more than chocolate bars at the time. Mind you, thinking back on what I was reading, I’m wondering if maybe I should have gone for the chocolate.

  12. on 25 May 2007 at 2:22 pm 12. Kiera PSI said …

    The one positive thing my mother gave me was a love of reading. I was allowed to stay up late if I was reading…within reason. Books were an item she’d actually purchase for me without my having to “earn” the money first. Books, and my imagination, became my refuge in an otherwise painful environment.

  13. on 25 May 2007 at 3:06 pm 13. Arnaud said …

    “If something hasn’t caught me full force after a chapter, I put it down and never pick it up again.”

    Jams, I envy you: that took me a very long time to learn. I have read in my time some extremely bad books, just because of this weird feeling of guilt I had when leaving one unfinished. Hell, I not only read Battlefield Earth, I read the whole series! That was painful…

    Still, I am better at it now. I just have to get rid of this compulsive re-reading habit of mine. (Don’t get me started…)

    Arnaud

    PS: Sorry for delurking, after all this time, on a post untitled “readers-anonymous”. Couldn’t really resist.

  14. on 25 May 2007 at 3:13 pm 14. christian h. said …

    Sorry for delurking, after all this time, on a post untitled “readers-anonymous”. Couldn’t really resist.

    Arnaud, thank you for delurking! I consider this post a success now. I’m with you - I still have trouble not finishing a book I don’t really enjoy. My most embarrassing example is that I read through numerous Battle Tech novels before I got myself to stop ingesting that militaristic crap.

  15. on 25 May 2007 at 3:49 pm 15. The Constructivist said …

    I, too, finished Battlefield Earth and I can say in all honesty it’s not nearly as bad as the Travolta movie. In any case, I want to warn you all, do not buy, borrow, or glance at a web page that lists the table of contents of What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World (2006), because there are literally hundreds of book suggestions in it. Heard of Faulkner’s A Fable? Me neither. Joseph Urgo makes a strong case that it may well be the most important antiwar novel for our time. Haven’t brushed up on Twain’s anti-imperialist writings? Amy Kaplan suggests why you should. Amy Schrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi’s introduction surveys a bookcase relevant to understanding our world. Yikes.

  16. on 25 May 2007 at 3:55 pm 16. christian h. said …

    Phew, TC, thanks for the warning. I’m totally going to stay away from whatever the book whose title I have already successfully repressed is…

  17. on 25 May 2007 at 5:00 pm 17. The Constructivist said …

    Just don’t look up! Better to delete #15!

  18. on 25 May 2007 at 6:45 pm 18. Oaktown Girl said …

    It was a wall-to-wall day at work, so I’m just reading all this now. Funny stuff. So…did anyone get re-trunked while I was away?

    I’m a non-fiction freak. I like fiction, and I’m not an anti-ficiton snob or anything, but the books that grab my attention the most just happen to be non-fiction. Sometimes I’ll read just one fiction book in an entire calendar year. Mostly I’m hooked on media and political analysis (as Kiera prepares to re-trunk herself just THINKING about it!). I’m also a big sucker for books about music and musicians (non-fiction, of course), and have a fairly strong hankering for art, language and history non-fiction as well.

    For more lighthearted fun I really enjoy comic strip collections such as Doonesbury, Boondocks, and Pearls Before Swine; but you see even those have a healthy dose of media, political, and social commentary. I’m pretty hopeless, no doubt about it.

    To the question JP posed asking if everyone was bitten by the book bug as a kid, James said:

    I’m pretty sure it was earlier than that.

    Which immediately made me think of this:

  19. on 25 May 2007 at 6:56 pm 19. christian h. said …

    That is such a great episode.

  20. on 25 May 2007 at 7:36 pm 20. Kiera PSI said …

    Yeah, Oaktown Girl is a non-fiction freak for sure. She won’t even read MY work. Sniff. And if she tries to get me to read one more media or political analysis I definitely WILL re-trunk myself. Just let me grab my pillow and spritzer fan first.

  21. on 25 May 2007 at 8:36 pm 21. Oaktown Girl said …

    Just let me grab my pillow and spritzer fan first.

    Hey! No pillows or spritzer or fans in The Trunk!

    And I just need to read your work while I’m sitting up! I always made the mistake of trying to read it in bed, because sci-fi/fantasy just made me think the appropriate atmosphere would be better with blankets and pillows. But reading in bed always puts me to sleep, so I should have known better. I’ll try again, but next time I’ll bring the pillows and blankets out to the couch and make sure I’m upright!

  22. on 26 May 2007 at 7:29 am 22. JP Stormcrow said …

    I don’t think I’m that much of a book junkie really

    Maybe not, but the one you describe, Home Land, sounds great - I will look it up. I too have Against the Day in wait as well as two Delillo’s: White Noise and Underworld. Just finished (a very quick read) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road - a book of great topical and historical interest for the party.

    A few book recs of recent and earlier vintage.

    1) David Mitchell’s multi-genre Cloud Atlas - especially if your remotely a Sci Fi fan - he gives good apocalypse too.
    2) A High Wind in Jamaica - written in the 1920s, to me this book is a much more interesting working of the “kids unfettered” theme than Lord of the Flies.
    3) Under the Net - Iris Murdoch produces one of the great male rogue characters.
    4) Big Phil’s Kid - my all-time favorite book that no one has heard of. (The link goes site that supposedly tells where it is available in libraries as at Used book sites it goes from $30.00 and up) Flawed, but hilarious coming-of-age story of a wise-cracking kid in a Mafia family. I have reread this book more than any other and still cannot help laughing out loud at a number of passages.

    Our familiy’s love of the book once led my mother to commit a “crime”. I originally found this in our local library, our family repeatedly checked it out (and were about the only ones - you could tell in those days via the names on the card.) Years later my mother was at a used-book sale at that branch and Lo and Behold there was the book. She took it up to purchase, whereupon, the librarian said it was out there mistakenly and was not for sale. So my mother stole it - and this from a woman from a family of several librarians.

    I do not have the book available where I am today, but I will venture a rendering of the opening.

    I was sixteen years old when I found out that our family tree was not exactly rooted in heaven. This knowledge was foisted on me by the sudden pruning of one of its branches. My Uncle Angie was partaking of his daily shave when he passed away unexpectedly - of fifteen bullet wounds.

    The author was M M Parker, a pseudonym, I often wondered if he has books under his real name as well.

  23. on 26 May 2007 at 7:54 am 23. JP Stormcrow said …

    [Family Guy in the womb video]

    One of the books that I blundered upon in the library at a relatively early age was John Barth’s collection of stories Lost in the Funhouse, but reading it then, I certainly did not pick up on the story Night Sea Journey being an allegorical rendering of the act of conception from the point of view of a spermatazoa.

    And in that vein, here is (a bit longish) clip from Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex - the sperm get into it a few minutes in. [Includes bonus French practice via the subtitles.]

    And speaking of longish - I happened to catch Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida on the radio last night while driving - had not heard it in years - turns out it was #391 of some top 500 countdown.

  24. on 26 May 2007 at 10:30 am 24. Phoenician in a time of Romans said …

    Speaking as a librarian,

    Keep reading, my little junkies. My magnificent lifestyle and continued malice for the human race depend on you enslaved to your habit. Suffer, you weak-willed peons, suffer.

    Bwahahahahahah (*cough* *cough* *HAAAAACK*)

  25. on 26 May 2007 at 11:06 am 25. Oaktown Girl said …

    Bwahahahahahah (*cough* *cough* *HAAAAACK*)

    Phoenician - that visual image you just gave me of the misanthropic chain-smoking librarian was just too funny. Best laugh of this young weekend so far.

    Now if I can just get that disgusting image of the misanthropic chain-smoking librarian out of my head.

  26. on 26 May 2007 at 11:47 am 26. The Constructivist said …

    Hey Phoenician, my wife enters a library science master’s program in the fall–any survival tips?

  27. on 26 May 2007 at 1:52 pm 27. Phoenician in a time of Romans said …

    Get yourself a new wife who won’t be poor for the rest of her existence?

    Sorry, don’t have my MLS yet either.

  28. on 26 May 2007 at 7:51 pm 28. Jams said …

    JP: White Noise and Underworld are both good, but, you know, DeLillo has that weird thing where all his characters seem as if they have a Phd in philosophy. It gets a little cloyingly academic after awhile, and both books suffer from it. Or benefit from it. It really depends on my mood I find. I have this odd respect for Delillo’s writing because I so enjoy his fiction even though I never forget that I’m reading a book written by an author - if you know what I mean. Usually I find that quality unbearable, but he makes up for it somehow.

    If only blogs were always so good. Which reminds me. I only know one blog that plucks my literary strings: DeadLetterCity - shockingly brilliant prose.

  29. on 27 May 2007 at 12:13 am 29. JP Stormcrow said …

    DeLillo has that weird thing where all his characters seem as if they have a Phd in philosophy

    With DeLillo, I had read all of his early stuff 20+ years ago until I burnt out on Running Dog ( it was really Ratner’s Star that pushed me over the edge though.) However, reading Michael’s post last year on White Noise got me thinking I should give him another go.

    I have more of a tolerance for that kind of style than is undoubtedly good for me. I probably spent too much time on Barth, and for as much as I enjoy Nabakov, I am not sure even he is always worth the effort. I find myself asking: Am I getting any real insights into the human condition here? Or is it just some extremely smart guy performing an act of impressive, but empty, literary masturbation? (of course all of the shortcomings may well reside in the reader.)

  30. on 29 May 2007 at 9:00 am 30. The Constructivist said …

    You know, it’s hard to be an English professor. I kind of missed/skipped the post-WW II white ethnic male writers thing and pomo narrative thing and zeroed in on the late ’60s to mid-’90s as a recent era that complements my real interests in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. So I never caught the Roth/Bellow/Updike and Nabokov/Barth/Pynchon buses and have still only read a teeny bit of them and their peers and descendants. My canon is more Morrison/Kingston/Silko and their peers and descendants. Forget keeping up with the past 10 years’ worth of fiction–I haven’t even kept up with my science fiction and fantasy reading, just sticking with new works by authors I already like (or am beginning not to like anymore)….

    My wife, though, is a reading machine. As a kid, she was literally a book addict. And this year in Japan, she’s been on something like a 5-book-per-week schedule (would be much more w/o kids). I thought I was a fast reader until I realized what she could do with Japanese fiction. One reason why she’s put me on a no-book-buying-in-Japan program (besides shipping costs) is that she knows full well she would have bankrupted her parents if she didn’t have school, community, city, prefectural and other libraries to ransack and ingest from age 3-18. Probably the worst thing about living in the States for her is not having easy access to a wide range of Japanese-language texts.

    So Phoenician, even though she talks a good game about being interested in public libraries’ changing role in a digitized media landscape, I think I know her real reason for pursuing the MLS….

  31. on 29 May 2007 at 10:30 am 31. christian h. said …

    And this year in Japan, she’s been on something like a 5-book-per-week schedule (would be much more w/o kids).

    That’s impressive. I have these binge reading attacks, but most of the time I don’t get much read, apart from mathematics, which is more of a “look over it” - kind of reading.

  32. on 29 May 2007 at 12:32 pm 32. JP Stormcrow said …

    My canon is more Morrison/Kingston/Silko and their peers and descendants.

    “My canon” is an interesting phrase. I am intrigued by the impact the fracturing of The Canon has had on your field. (I know the traditionalists decry it.) There is such a surfeit of literature, that as a reader, I often feel overwhelmed (I quit reading the NY Times Review of Books for a long time, because reading it only filled me with despair at what I would never, ever get to …) I also have very hard time predicting what others are likely to have read.

    Is there still some core that you “must” know? I assume that it is small - Shakespeare, The Bible, Greek mythology, what else? Fielding? Milton? Dante? Austen? Sterne? Is there any 19th or 20th century author that every literature prof has read (or read deeply)? (Faulkner, James, Dickens, Hawthorne, Joyce, George Eliot.) Anyone even close to that since 1950?

  33. on 30 May 2007 at 6:38 pm 33. The Constructivist said …

    My first response is to say I think what people can be counted on to have read is almost totally fragmented now, partly due to specialization encouraged in graduate studies and partly due to curricular creep (just add in another specialty course!). I’ve had Americanists tell me they’ve never read any Melville or Faulkner.

    Still, that para is probably too negative and overstated. I’ve read all but Dante, Fielding, and Sterne on your list, for instance. But then I took surveys in college lit courses, took lit-like courses outside the English dept., as well, and looked for courses outside my fields in grad school to try to fill in some of my many gaps. And I’ve still got a million. Being limited pretty much to English, I’ve only encountered world lit through translations.

    Maybe lit profs overstate how little they’ve read b/c they distinguish between just having read something and being prepared to teach it or give a talk on it or publish something on it. And because they’re more aware of what there is to be missed and how much of it there is. Half the writers on the list you gave me I was going to say “no” to, but then I realized I had actually read them (just not for teaching or research purposes!).

    ACTA and others charge the traditional canon is no longer being taught, but that’s due to bad methodology on their part. If they actually looked carefully at requirements and enrollements, they’d see students are still reading a lot of the names you’d expect. But more on that later–cf. Tim Burke, The Little Professor, and Scott Eric Kaufman on limits of ACTA reports (and of course le Blogue Berube).