Under the Net

I did not expect to like this book at all.

For some reason, certain books get linked with other books in my mind. Such as: I have long associated Zuleika Dobson with a book written about Sarajevo (Zlata's Diary). I have no idea why, other than the strange Z names. In this case, I had lumped Under the Net with The Ginger Man in my mind. I could not keep them straight. And since I have only read bad reviews for The Ginger Man, I have not looked forward to reading Under the Net.

Once - was it earlier this year? - I picked Under the Net up off the shelf, laid down on the bed in my library (which, in case you wanted to know, was my great-grandparents bed) and read a few pages. Now, in the first few pages all we learn is that Jake is being kicked out of where he was staying. I didn't care about this. So I put it back, further cementing in my mind that I was not going to like reading this book.

But in my effort to get through the Modern Library's List by the end of next year (it's going to be close - I've got a lot of thick books ahead), I knew I would have to read it. And as I've mostly got, as I just mentioned, LONG books left (An American Tragedy, Studs Lonigan, Women in Love, and *ahem* Finnegan's Wake) I thought now, while I'm home with Brendan, might be a good time to knock this one out.

Ok, so I was slightly bored in the beginning. I couldn't tell you when the novel picked up for me, but it was long before Jake steals the show dog from Sammy's apartment in order to use it as a bargaining tool to get his manuscript back. And by the time we got to THAT part, I was really into it. Under the Net turned out to be a funny! I had no idea.

Jake needs a place to stay, and that sets off a series of events, and for a time he finds a place to stay, and even has a job, but that all unravels, and he ends up exactly where he was in the beginning - but this time with a dog. Not the most exciting novel ever, but I found it entertaining. I've already added The Sea, The Sea to my TBR. Under the Net may be one of the few remaining pleasures on the list...after all, I'm staring down Women in Love, Old Wives Tale, AND Finnegans Wake.

I'm a little annoyed with Netflix...or maybe I should say I'm annoyed at myself. I was really looking forward to seeing the movie Iris, which is based on Murdoch's life with her husband. But of course like the dumby that I am sometimes, yesterday I was searching for some French New Wave films, and accidently rearranged my queue so that The Fire Within is on its way instead of Iris. Oh well.

A Few More Modern Library Reviews

#45 The Sun Also Rises I thought that I would like this book. I really didn't. I thought it was boring, even though there was bullfighting. I wish that I liked it. I did like Brett, though.

#74 A Farewell to Arms The other Hemingway on the list. I read this in April or May of 2003. I remember the time very vividly. I had graduated college the December before, but all my friends were still at school. So every weekend, I would go to visit them, get terribly "tight" (as Ernest would say) and then go back to work on Monday and pretend to be some kind of responsible adult. This all was complicated by the fact that I was in this strange almost-relationship of sorts with a German exchange student there who was going back to der Vaterland in May. And there was someone else who I also had my eye on, who had a girlfriend and who I thought couldn't really care less about me (but he was in love with me, as I came to discover two years later). Did I mention that I was engaged to someone else at the time? Yeah. Let's just say that I was A TOTAL MESS. And during this time, I read A Farewell to Arms. Honestly, all I remember of it was the scene in the end where they are rowing away across a lake. That did happen in this book, right? I'm not sure if I don't remember anything else because I was drunk all the time, or because my life was a mess, or because I was kind of indifferent to the novel, though I liked it much better than The Sun Also Rises.

#78 Kim This novel factored heavily in The English Patient, which is one of my favorite novels OF ALL TIME. So, I was expecting to really like it. I didn't.

#100 The Magnificent Ambersons Sometime I am going to have to back and reread this book and do a long post on it. This is one of those books that I have never heard of outside of this list, by an author I had also never heard of. But this book is great. The main character, George, is an asshole, and enough bad things cannot happen to him. You WANT bad things to happen to this jerk. What sticks in my mind most about this novel is that it really predicts the future. Written in the early 1900s, sometimes it feels like someone from the last 50 years writing about what impact the car was going to have on society, knowing already what that impact was. But Tarkington really saw it coming...he hit it right on the nose. Definately a novel that deserves more fanfare than it seems to get.

The Naked and the Dead

If you would have told me in August that while I was off on maternity leave, I would have the time to read a 700+ page novel, I would have laughed at you. But I somehow managed to find the time to get through The Naked and the Dead in between changing diapers and feeding Brendan. It's amazing what you can do when you just read 20 or so pages a day.

I was trying to remember if I've ever actually read a "war book" before. I tried to read Enemy at the Gates in 2002 or 2003, but didn't get very far. Same thing happened with The Thin Read Line. Last year I tried to read All Quiet on the Western Front, but I wasn't at the right place in my life for it, so I shelved it. I owned The Killer Angels for a long time, but never even opened it. I got rid of it a few years ago, knowing I would never read it because frankly, I don't give a damn about the Civil War. In high school I read Howard Fast's April Morning, which I suppose could be called a war book of some sort, but it's kind of a young adult book, and to classify it with what I might call REAL war books seems strange. From Here to Eternity (can that be classified as a war book?) and The Things They Carried have long been on my TBR list, but they haven't come up yet. So really, The Naked and the Dead is really the first true war novel I've ever read.

I liked The Naked and the Dead. For being more than 700 pages, it wasn't slow or daunting, and I found myself really wanting to know what was going to happen to all these characters and whether or not they would make it through the pass and then over the mountain. And to say that - that I really cared about what happened - may be the first mark of a good book. There are a lot of books on this Modern Library list that I cared as much about the characters as I do about the Civil War. And the fact that I felt invested in what happened to Gallagher, and Goldstein, and Hearn, and that I hated Croft and the General (though I really liked Croft at first - until he killed the bird) surprised me. I honestly didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. All that the men went through, trying to climb that mountain, only to turn back because of a hornets nest.

The first - and main thing - that struck me about TN&TD is the debt that Mailer clearly owes to John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. The structure of Mailer's novel reminded me so much of 42nd Parallel from the very beginning; the narrative style was similar as well. Dos Passos is everywhere for me this year...both in this novel and in Ragtime. It's amazing to think that that trilogy had clearly such an impact on the rest of the century's writing, and yet it is virtually unheard of. Well, maybe it's not actually unheard of. I had never heard of it outside of all these Top 20th century lists. It wasn't discussed in my high school english classes, where we spent a considerable amount of time on Dos Passos's contemporaries, Fitzgerald and Hemingway specifically. This really annoys me. Poor Dos Passos, you pilot fish!

The back of my copy of the book says that The Naked and the Dead is the most important American novel since Moby Dick. I think in that statement a lot of very important American novels are skipped over - specifically The Great Gatsby. And I really don't see how it can be rated as important as Moby Dick, but I liked it anyway.

Life of Pi

Last year, my mom and I had the following conversation:

MOM: I read a good book - Life of Pi, and I think that I get it. The boy was the tiger, and the sailor was the zebra, and the cook was the hyena...
ME: So what was the religious theme of the book?
MOM: What?
ME: I thought there was some religious theme to it.
MOM: I don't know. I guess I will have to re-read it.

I've been hearing about Life of Pi for a long time. And I have been avoiding it. First of all, I don't like to read popular books. I don't want people to think that I'm someone who jumps on a bandwagon; someone who reads Faulkner because Oprah told me to. I ADORE Faulkner (despite our initially contentious relationship), but I would have purposely NOT read him during the time that he was Oprah's book club pick. Unless, of course, I could wear a shirt that said, "I LOVED FAULKNER BEFORE OPRAH." Books with buzz tend to scare me away.

I have been avoiding Life of Pi for the other reason as well: it's religious theme. It's a book that is supposed to make you believe in god. Oh boy, one of those books. No thank you.

But then, there are people whose opinion of books I take seriously, mostly because we have such similar tastes. So, I have finally given in and read it.

First of all, the key to this book is in the author's introduction. You have to read that first, or like my mom, you will miss the point. Martel gives us two stories: one is fantastical - unbelievable. A boy is on a lifeboat with a tiger for almost a year and the tiger doesn't eat him? The second story is the believable, and probably true one. But which one is the better story? Which one makes life more interesting? Obviously the fantastical one. The religious theme, of course is that we can choose to believe the religious stories - that god created us special, and a baby was born to a virgin in a stable, and angels and shepherds, and wise men, and all the other religious stories, or we can believe the "real" story. You can take your pick. God is the better story.

Now in the previous paragraph, I only listed the Christian story. But Life of Pi is not exclusively a Christian story. Pi is also a Hindu and a Muslim. So it doesn't matter if your story is Kali and Shiva and the turtle - or is it an elephant? - holding up the world, or whatever stories it is that Muslims believe (I admit my inexcusable ignorance of what is in the Koran), or if you believe in the baby in a manger. Martel is just saying that the better story is the fantastical one...the one that it's hard to believe but is more beautiful...or more exciting, or something.

I'm not really sure about that though. They are good stories, some of them at least. But isn't the story of the natural world just as interesting, just as worthy of awe? Go on youtube and listen to some of Neal DeGrasse Tyson's talks on the universe and you'll see what I mean.

All in all, Life of Pi wasn't bad. It's not the greatest thing I ever read. But for being popular, it was a pretty decent read.

Booking Through Thursday

I'm a week late on this one. Oh well.

If you could ask your favorite author (alive or dead) one question … who would you ask, and what would the question be?

This one is easy. I would ask Jack Kerouac if he drank himself to death on purpose. This question has plagued me for years...almost a decade now. In the documentary What Happened to Kerouac, someone (I never remember who she is, but she was a friend of his) says that he told her that as a Catholic he couldn't kill himself, so he intended to drink himself to death. Which he succeeded at admirably. However, this woman is not included in any of his biographies - I've checked the indexes. And in general, the possibility that Jack was drinking with the intent to kill himself isn't even discussed. Did this person, whose novels exude an enthusiasm for life, commit a slow form of suicide on purpose, or was death just a consequence of drinking in order to escape the realities of what fame (or infamy) had brought him?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I have been meaning to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for a long time...either since it came out, or since I read Foer's other book, Everything is Illuminated - I don't remember which happened first. I LOVED Everything is Illuminated. It's one of the best books I ever read. It was funny, moving, quirky, terribly sad. And it was awesome. So obviously I was looking forward to EL&IC, but also a little afraid...I was afraid it would be like my "relationship" with F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby absolutely blew me away when I read it in 10th grade, and since then I have read other Fitzgerald novels, but none of them are as good. He knocked it out of the ball park with Gatsby, and how could you rival that? So I have been timid about Extremely Loud - what if it just wasn't as good...then I would be disappointed.

But EL&IC did NOT disappoint. Within the first dozen or so pages I was laughing out loud: "Succotash my Balzac, dip shiitake!" But as I said, there is a pervasive sadness, centered around 9/11. This isn't my first 9/11 novel. It seems to have become like my Holocaust novels - I keep reading them. Their sadness is different from other tragic books, because you know what happens. From the very beginning, I knew how Oskar lost his father. You know what is going to happen, what the narrative is circling around. And it doesn't even need to be stated. Foer didn't need to say, "those messages were left on the phone on September 11th." It needn't be said - we know. It's not a novel about 9/11, but rather a novel in the shadow of 9/11.

It takes a lot for a novel - or anything really - to move me, especially to move me to tears, and this one did - and more than once. This book gave me "heavy boots." I finished it yesterday, and I can still feel its weight.

I know that Foer often gets mixed reviews, but I think that he is my favorite contemporary writer. The more I read, the more I like. Tragicomedy must be my thing. With EL&IC, I would definitely recommend having read Grass's The Tin Drum first. It's certainly not necessary, but there are a lot of parallels, which really enhance the reading.

Booking Through Thursday

I was wanting to try a certain author and wished I knew someone who had read her works so I could get a recommendation when it occurred to me that having a “YOU ask the question” Booking Through Thursday might be fun. Each participant could ask a question they’ve wanted to discuss with other readers. Perhaps, like me, you’d like a recommendation of a certain author’s best work, or perhaps you LOVE a certain genre or series but no one else you know does and you’d just like to discuss it with someone. Or perhaps you want to try a new genre and would like recommendations from seasoned readers.

It would help if everyone put some idea of the question or topic in their response comment here rather than just saying, “My post is up” so that those who can’t get around to everyone can see what the topics are and get to those which most interest them.


This is a good one! Here is my question: I LOVE the films of David Lynch, especially Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway - two of my favorite movies of all time (and his collaboration with Danger Mouse - freaking awesome). I have always wanted to find writers who are writing novels like those David Lynch movies: stylistic, beautiful, weird, haunting, etc.

On a (probably related) separate note: anyone read Bizarro literature? If so, where's a good place to start?