The Principia Discordia feels more like an object of art than a book. Very peculiar art. Like, it isn’t a book I’d ever recommend as a book, but I’m glad that I read it and, critically, glad that I have a copy lying around the house.

Fear and Loathing just oozes so much style that I couldn’t help but love it. I read it after reading a few of Hunter S Thompson’s famous articles like “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” where his voice is just as clear—easily some of my favorite non-fiction writing.

I have two complementary systems:

1. An ever-growing list of books I want to read on Goodreads. In the past it grew faster than I went through it; this year I’ve been pretty good about reading books from the list, so it’s hovered around 200 books all year.

2. Piles of unread books left haphazardly around the house. I get around to reading some of them eventually.

Gravity’s Rainbow has my absolutely favorite opening lines:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

There’s just something so evocative about it. It pulled me right in. Then I ended up putting the book aside about 30% of the way in just because it required way more focus to read than I had to spare at the time :P

Definitely planning to get back to it at some point, maybe on a long vacation…

Probably The Third Policeman. I had totally forgotten why it was on my to-read list, so I thought it was just a generic mystery novel coming in… it wasn’t that. It actually did start out like a crime novel with some slightly weird undertones, but then it just took a sharp left turn and went totally off the rails. Completely wild book—it’s complete nonsense that makes sense in a dream-logic sort of way. I’ve read a lot of books that try to read like dreams, but they’re always either too internally consistent or fall apart completely; The Third Policeman is a rare book that actually pulls it off.

What really pulls it together is the language. The language is the internal logic that keeps the book flowing: nothing in the book makes sense if you think about it conceptually, but it’s kept together through what I can best describe as a sort of language association game. At one, point, for example, the main character has forgotten his name, so he makes up with a list of names he might have had:

Hugh Murray. Constantin Petrie. Signor Beniamino Bari. The Honourable Alex O’Brannigan, Bart. Kurt Freund. Mr John P. deSalis, M.A. Dr Solway Garr. Bonaparte Gosworth. Legs O’Hagan.

Then his conscience—named Joe—goes off on a tangent about the just-made-up Signor Beniamino Bari:

Signor Beniamino Bari, Joe said, the eminent tenor. Three baton-charges outside La Scala at great tenor’s preimere. Extraordinary scenes were witnessed outside La Scala Opera House when a crowd of some ten thousand devotees, incensed by the management’s statement that no more standing-room was available, attempted to rush the barriers. Thousands were injured…

This random story about a totally made-up name goes on for a couple more paragraphs. Then there’s another one about Dr Solway Garr, until the main character—still nameless—has had enough:

I think that is quite enough, I said.

…and then none of the names or stories ever come up again. Almost everything in the book is like that: here for a moment, gradually transforms into something totally different and then never comes back. It’s something between watching improv and dreaming.

And sometimes the language is just hilarious on its own. Random phrases just totally got me on occasion:

It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.

Not a bad descrption for the whole book, really!

but so much of this book, particularly the writing itself, has gone completely over my head.

I still come across books like that occasionally, and I’ve learned to just go with the flow and enjoy the confusion :). I can get a lot out of a book even if I miss relatively “obvious” ideas or subtext, much less the level of analysis that people can get out of a book when they really try. Some books benefit from multiple reads or even from reading the book with annotations or a companion work. Other books are, frankly, better if you don’t try to read too deeply into them.

And, frankly, some analysis I’ve read definitely crosses the line from insight to reading signal from noise. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! Humans are great at finding complex patterns and meaning in the outside world… even if that meaning isn’t really there, or isn’t even meaningful.

My recent favorite has been The Price You Pay. It’s an over-the-top, heavily stylized revenge thriller—imagine the literary equivalent of Kill Bill—with a distinct first-person voice and a decidedly modern sensibility. Non-stop action, a black sense of humor and a fun take on modern life, society and technology; all the fun of a great thriller but more intelligent and insightful than most of the genre.

This really depends on what it takes to qualify as a “classic”. I’ve respected all of the really well-known classics I’ve read, but I’ve come across a few stinkers on the long tail :P

My most recent disappointment was The Magus by John Fowles—pretentious pseudo-profound wank that takes itself far too seriously. And yet it’s made it onto seemingly serious “top 100” lists? Rather uncharitably, it strikes me as the worst sort of middlebrow book that dull people read to seem intelligent.

When I bother to write reviews on Goodreads I usually try to substantiate my criticism, but I didn’t bother in this case:

An interminable book that imagines itself profound, expansive, incisive—but only manages pretentious, superficial and dull.

It’s a long book that self-consciously exhibits all the superficial signifiers of “serious literature” without the substance to back it up. The characters are flat, the relationships between them are strained, the plot is contrived, the war flashbacks—a rare part of the book that had potential—are nothing more than flat, cliche moral plays. The psychological babble towards the end seems to be played straight but is self-parodyingly bad, too condescending and insufficiently earnest to get into “so bad it’s good” territory.

The craziest thing is that this is the sort of book I usually like! I’m a total sucker for postmodern books that are twice as long as they have to be and go all over the place. I’m totally willing to forgive poor characterization and an incoherent plot if the writing is strong and the ideas are interesting. The Magus had to fail on every dimension for me to dislike it.

Maybe that’s the point of the book and I missed it. But the fundamental problem is that you can’t critique or satirize poor writing and poor thinking just by writing poorly and thinking poorly yourself. You can absolutely write something incredible that seems crazy at the surface—one of my favorite reads this year was Pale Fire and that’s what it does—but you have to execute it in a way that works on multiple levels. Making bad writing good is really hard. Even if that’s what The Magus was trying—and, frankly, I am not convinced it was—it ended up an abject failure.

I should probably just take this whole comment and put it up as my review on Goodreads :P

The Name of the Rose would be my choice, assuming he hasn’t read it. It covers some fun ideas in a relatively deep, well-thought-out way, while also being a legitimately engaging historical mystery. It was also one of the rare novels where I felt like the conspiracy/suspense side of the story resolved in a satisfying and interesting way.

…in which his own image, what Morini saw as Mornini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it’s burning.

A random simile in 2666 I found especially evocative. I can’t articulate why it stood out specifically, it’s just such a compelling image.

This was one of the worst books for me too. Doubly so considering the hype and online reviews it’s gotten! The plot was just a big string of soap-opera-level contrived situations and cliches; the characters’ personalities were inconsistent part-to-part and wholly unconvincing; the writing was patronizing and pretentious, making sure to tell you the point of each episode in case you missed the generic, heavily telegraphed moral message.

Also, the book’s treatment of video games and game development was just bizarre. There were some interesting ideas—one of which was apparently lifted from Brenda Romero with no attribution—but the gaming particulars were often either superficial or didn’t make sense. There was a chapter towards the end that was supposed to be describing a game; it was a neat idea at a high level, but the execution was not even wrong. What that chapter was describing was, in a fundamental way, simply not how games work because it would simply make no sense for games to work that way. And I say this as somebody who is very open to experimental and indie games!

It’s always wild to read books where there’s such a delta between popular perception—so many people online gush about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as if it were the best work of literature they had ever read—and actuality. Hell, I understand when it goes the other way around; some books are very much an acquired taste. But how does something so bad in every relevant dimension get such praise?

I did rather like the cover design though, so there’s that :)

I haven’t read Blood Meridian specifically, but I also have ADHD and find myself needing to reread pages in some books. I still remember sitting on the train and repeatedly rereading paragraphs in Midnight’s Children. Absolutely beautiful book, but it definitely required some close attention!

What I’ve found is that audiobooks often help. When I first started out with audiobooks I was worried that I would miss details or constantly get distracted, but I’ve found that many books are actually easier to follow in audio. I mean, I still get distracted periodically and have to rewind by a few minutes, but it happens less than with physical books. I listened to The Satanic Verses as an audiobook and I’m pretty sure I would not have gotten through it otherwise.

With Gravity’s Rainbow, I actually ended up doing both: listening to the audiobook while following along with a physical copy. Sounds a bit silly, but it worked pretty well. I absolutely loved the writing but it required almost physically painful amounts of focus to follow along :P

Now, the audio version isn’t always easier, but it happens often enough that I default to audiobooks over physical books when I can. (It also helps that I can listen while walking outside!) I’m not sure how well it would work for Blood Meridian specifically, but it could be worth a try.