Sometimes too much information is a bad thing. Last night I had to attend a poetry reading — and I say “had to” because my writing professor had arranged the reading and threatened the class with death, flunking, and/or flogging if we failed to attend, and he scheduled it during our class time so we had no excuse anyway. I occasionally enjoy poetry read aloud, but often I can’t stand it; it makes me antsy and impatient. I didn’t have time to read anything by the poet, Olga Broumas, but I did google her name to see what I could find. And I found this series of short reviews, which talk about mythic timelessness and worshipful visions of femaleness, and I thought there was no way I would survive the reading. I am not so much a fan of mythic timelessness and worshipful visions of anything.

But I loved it. My attention didn’t waiver for the entire hour that she read, and she was just wonderful even though she was reading with a head cold. Now I am about to write the kind of sentence that I can’t stand and say that she radiated warmth, but she did and I’m not sure how else to say it. I never bother with author signatures in books but I bought a copy of Rave and asked her to sign it, and she hugged me, and I am a fan. I came home and added Perpetua to my wish list, because it is named after my favorite spot on the west coast, a beautiful spot on the Oregon coast, and also Eros, Eros, Eros, her translation of Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, because she read from it and it was just wonderful.

See, I cannot discuss poetry intelligently; either it bores the hell out of me or it turns me into a blubbering fan girl. Go read Monique if you want brainy discussions of poetry. I’ll be over here going, “Check it out, she totally hugged me!”

Over at the Usual Suspects, we are putting together a Balzac reading group. We have a couple of Balzac fans and we are trying to indoctrinate the rest of the board. Right now we’re just deciding what to read first.

We are also discussing possible future books for seminar discussion, along the lines of our current Ulysses seminar.

Starting April 1, we begin early discussions of the regular book club selection, Savushun.

Nightwood. The last of my college guilt books, i.e., books I was assigned and on which I possibly took some exams but which I never actually read. I had this pegged in my head as a very difficult book, but I’m about halfway through and so far it isn’t difficult at all, and the prose is so beautiful that I keep rereading passages just for the pleasure of it.

I half wish I were reading the original (dirtier) version. Maybe I’ll read that one next year.

At the end of 2003 I made myself a reading list for the coming year, with a goal of knocking off at least half of the listed books by the end of 2004. Later I realized that I had included only a few female authors, so I mentally revised the list. I decided it was time to post an update — new additions are in bold; the crossed-off selections are the ones I’ve finished. But now I’m probably just hoping to read a third of these.

1. Alai, Red Poppies
2. Rabih Alameddine, I, The Divine (Review)
3. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
4. Monica Ali, Brick Lane
5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
6. Beryl Bainbridge, Watson’s Apology (Abandoned)
7. James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
8. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (Review)
9. Andrea Barrett, Voyage of the Narwhal
10. Charlotte Brontë, Villette
11. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
12. Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (Review)
13. Chang Ta-chun, Wild Kids
14. Don DeLillo, Underworld (Review)
15. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Review)
16. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
17. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
18. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
19. William Faulkner, The Hamlet
20. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
21. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Review)
22. Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
23. Guy Garcia, Skin Deep
24. Molly Gloss, Wild Life (Review )
25. Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum (Review)
26. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
27. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
28. Hsiao Li-Hung, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers
29. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Review.)
30. Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man
31. James Joyce, Ulysses (Review)
32. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
33. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
34. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
35. Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Review)
36. Lorrie Moore, Like Life (Review)
37. Toni Morrison, Jazz
38. Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters (Review)
39. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
40. Ovid, Metamorphoses
41. Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
42. Annie Proulx, Postcards
43. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
44. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
45. Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
46. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
47. J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World
48. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
49. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Review)
50. David Toscana, Tula Station (Review)
51. Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party (Review)
52. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
53. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Occasionally I find a book that feels like it was written specifically for me. The Brothers K, by David James Duncan, was one of those books: it felt as if the author had read my mind, discovered exactly what makes me love a book, and written a novel just for me.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli is kind of the opposite of that: it’s a book that feels like it was written specifically to annoy me. Taking the premise from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and infusing it with a good dose of Humbert Humbert, Greer’s novel tells the story of a man who ages backwards. Max Tivoli is born in Victorian San Francisco as a 70-year-old man, and as the new century begins he ages backward into childhood. But this isn’t a fictional biography, exactly; at a scant 250 pages, the novel doesn’t have time to explore Max’s life or the history he experiences except in the most superficial fashion. Instead, the novel focuses on the story of Max’s enduring and obsessive love for a woman named Alice, whom he meets when she is fourteen and he is a seventeen-year-old trapped in the body of an old man, and then meets and loves twice more in the course of his life and the novel. In Greer’s hands, Max’s love for Alice is the whole point of his life, the point of the novel.

I have already written at some length about why this book and the positive reviews it has received have irritated me. The novel starts with a line that makes me roll my eyes: “We are each the love of someone’s life.” The entire book plays out that idiotic premise; I kept holding on to the idea that this was just the narrator’s twisted view of the world, but in the end the plot supports this romantic fallacy: the three main characters (Max, Alice, and Max’s lifelong friend Hughie) simply exist to love in vain, to hold onto obsessive and impossible loves from childhood until they die.

It depresses me more than I can tell you that the reviews discuss this book as if it reveals some deep and wise truths about the nature of love. I think I could have enjoyed the book on the level of a tragic monster tale; in some ways Max is Quasimodo or King Kong, a monster who can only love from afar. But Greer won’t allow you to read the book in that light; to Greer, we are [i]all[/i] Quasimodo, loving monstrously and forever. [i]Max Tivoli[/i] is the worst sort of romance, a genre I can’t stand in the first place: love here is a sort of inescapable mental illness; the novel acknowledges that obsessive love can lead to terrible cruelties, and yet seems to find a beautiful nobility in its characters’ refusal to abandon their hopeless obsessions.

I guess that premise works for a lot of people. Maybe it would have worked for me had the prose not veered between awkward anachronism and overwrought Victorian excess. I doubt it, though, and I doubt I will be reading anything else by this author.

Gilligan’s Wake. As I was reading this book I sometimes could not quite decide whether it was entirely brilliant or just really, really slick. I think I have decided that’s a little bit brilliant and very slick indeed, but either way I loved it. Gilligan’s Wake is already an early front-runner in this year’s “Books That Beth Will Force You To Read, Possibly At Gunpoint” contest.

To first answer the question that was posed at TUS so many times that it really started to irritate me: yes, the book is about the television show, but no, it’s not really about the television show. If you are familiar with the theme song from Gilligan’s Island, you know enough to read this book. Carson tells several stories here: the backstory of each of the seven castaways (a backstory that fits those castaways’ descriptions in the theme song but otherwise doesn’t have much to do with the show), the story of cold war America, and a different secret story that you don’t quite unravel until the final pages, a story that illuminates and makes specific and personal that larger story of America’s loss of imagined innocence and the country’s denial of that loss.

Carson’s prose is some of the best I’ve read recently, but what impresses me the most is that while this is, in fact, a very slick and slightly silly postmodern metafiction monster, the characters are very true, very affecting. The fictional and historical characters that Carson borrows for his own purposes generally do not feel pasted in; Carson has enough talent that he can rewrite other people’s fiction in a way that effectively alters his source material, whether he’s working with literature, television, or history. Daisy Buchanan will never be the same to me now, and it goes without saying that neither will the castaways.

Gilligan’s Wake is a political book; it is a book about America in the 20th century, about American archetypes, about evil and a refusal to let go of an innocence that is probably all crap to begin with. I am generally a little bored by overtly political books, and I confess that I became a little impatient during the Professor’s chapter, where I would have appreciated a little more subtlety. But underneath the politics there are real characters, and those characters are very, very well written. Carson chose his source well; Sherwood Schwartz deliberately created cardboard characters because he wanted archetypes, not real people. Carson takes those archetypes back and makes them real, and then collapses them again. It’s pretty brilliant.

I feel the need to defend my favorite character while I’m here. Although the author himself didn’t like the future Mrs. Howell, I thought she was a fantastic character. I love the way she doesn’t even have a name — she’s not Mrs. Howell yet here, but we don’t know her ‘real’ name. Thurston calls her “L.” or “Lovey,” but as a nickname that’s bitterly ironic at best, since she is absolutely unsentimental. She’s an empty space and she fills herself up with sex, morphine, other people’s favors. I realize she’s supposed to be selfish and horrible but I found her to be heartbreaking. (And if I have a criticism, it’s that he spells out the “filling up empty spaces” thing in the last chapter; you get that from her own chapter and don’t need Mary Anne to tell you.) I thought the entire book was wonderful, but the millionaire and his wife are the sections that got to me the most.

The Modern World has an excellent review that ought to give you a good idea of whether this is a book you will enjoy. I will give potential readers one big hint: the first section is the most difficult; it’s the only section that seems to really invoke James Joyce, and it’s filled with dozens of references and stream-of-conscious passages that can be a little rough to navigate. After that, the references will either make sense or they will be easy to look up or they will go over your head entirely, but the characters and story stand on their own and you will be fine as long as you have a rudimentary knowledge of cold war history at least through Watergate. I also think you will miss a lot if you haven’t read The Great Gatsby, but at least one person at TUS has read and loved Carson’s book without having read the Fitzgerald.

We are discussing the book at TUS, and I started a list of references we spotted, which might or might not be helpful to someone else who is reading or about to read. Mostly it was just fun trying to catch them.

The Empress Orchid. I had to start a new audiobook; I am about halfway through Underworld and I am remembering that I hate Don DeLillo. I will probably finish Underworld in paperback to get it over with.

I don’t have much to say so far about The Empress Orchid except that I wish the narrator would take a Sudafed.

We are still hanging in there with Ulysses; after this week I think we’ll be about a quarter of the way done with the book. The reading schedule, chat schedule, and transcripts of previous chats are available on the TUS Ulysses page, and board discussion continues throughout the week.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli. I am tearing through this book and I will stick with it, I think, but I kind of hate it. As I recently mentioned at the Usual Suspects, I am very bored by love stories: if your book was written any time in the last hundred years or so, I’m really not going to be interested if it primarily centers around romance, the breaking up and coming together of two people, one person’s search for love, or anything along those lines. Or if it is going to be about that, it better be about more than that, or be about that in an interesting way, or something. If it ends with a marriage, or with our plucky heroine finding the man who will make her life perfect, or with somebody realizing that someone else is the person for whom the first somebody has been searching, then I am going to throw up and not read any more of your stupid books. And that bias of mine, that dislike for books that are all about love, might be at the heart of my dislike for Max Tivoli: I am even less moved by stories of obsessive love than I am by stories of requited love, so if your story is going to center around a fifty-year unrequited obsession, you’d better keep me interested because you aren’t going to move me. And unfortunately, Max is not interesting beyond the aging gimmick; he is a very dull character whose sole interest in life is this girl/woman he can’t have. Worse, the overwrought prose is really too much.

Max Tivoli got really good reviews; in fact, reviewers practically fawned over the book and promised me life-changing wisdom. Instead I am getting “quivering breasts” and a narrator who has all the stunted single-mindedness of Humbert Humbert, without any of the wit or humor that makes Humbert fascinating.

The New Yorker review makes for fine reading, but The Confessions of Max Tivoli is more Caleb Carr than F. Scott Fitzgerald or Vladimir Nabokov.

We are currently discussing the second reading assignment, the first three Bloom episodes, through the “Hades” section, ending with this line:

Thank you. How grand we are this morning.

This week’s chat will be held on Thursday, March 18, at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. In order to join the chat you must be registered at the Usual Suspects; once you are logged in the chat link will magically appear. You need Java installed and chat doesn’t work with Safari, but otherwise it’s all pretty self-explanatory, and besides we are patient and willing to help if you need it. I will post the chat transcript later Thursday evening.

I am really enjoying Ulysses so far, much more than I thought I would. I feel like I am cheating because I start by reading the relevant chapter in The New Bloomsday Book, and then I read the actual Joyce chapter, and then I skim the notes from Ulysses Annotated.

For April: Savushun, by Simin Danishvar. For May: The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. (We are promised a Back Alley brawl over that one.) For June: check back in a few weeks for the poll.

Edited to delete the July information, as I have decided that I am too easily irritated to lead the book club myself in any given month.

The Valleys of the Assassins. We are discussing this now in the book club, but the few of us who managed to finish it did not really like it. Almost all of us enjoyed the first story, but most people bogged down in the later stories, and those of us who made it to the end wound up hating Stark a little.

This is a travelogue, not a novel, and part of the problem is that Stark really can’t tell a story. Her material is interesting on its own — a British woman travels through remote parts of Persia alone in the 1920s and 1930s — but she seems committed to telling her stories in the dullest way she can. Every tale goes from expectation to anticlimax with no regard for keeping the reader’s interest: she’s hunting for treasure! Except there is no treasure and she doesn’t even really look for it. The hills are crawling with bandits! Except there are no bandits. She could be captured by the police! Except her passport is fine and the police are sort of bumbling and nothing really happens. A little boy will surely die! But he doesn’t die. Nobody dies, there is no treasure, nobody falls off a mountain. It’s not that kind of story.

Which is fine. What makes the book work, when it does work, is Stark’s humor and her openness to adventure and her general fondness for people. Her recountings of minor interactions with villagers are the best part of the story, and for the first hundred pages or so that’s enough to keep the book interesting. But there is no reflection, no sense of what she has learned or gained from these travels, and a constant sense of anticlimax, and eventually you just can’t wait for it to be over with. Because one anticlimactic moment can be funny or ironic; two dozen of them just make for a boring book.

And then we have the last section, the chapter about the throne of Solomon. This chapter is the biggest disappointment of the book, because up until then Stark has been remarkably likeable and remarkably free of the prejudices and privileged attitude you might expect from a British woman traveling in Persia during this time period. But in the final chapter, we see a different Stark: one who orders a famly out of their home so she can use it, one who balks at paying a small sum for her food to impoverished villagers, and one who you quite frankly wish would fall off the damn rock already.

I do recommend the first section of the book; Stark is funny and she notices all the right details, and the first chapter is entertaining and intriguing. Unfortunately the rest of the book doesn’t hold up.

Wow, I am so sorry for neglecting this site. Just insanely busy at work right now; I have a new Supreme Court case and I’m covering for a coworker who is out on leave, and it means a whole different workload for me and all kinds of responsibility that I am just not used to.

I am, however, keeping up on my reading, even if I’m not touching, so far, my reading-about-reading. So just a few posts tonight, all about me and what I’m reading. It’s my site so I can do that.

I meant to post a reminder about the first Ulysses chat tonight, but I forgot. So the least I can do is post the transcript. Warning: we are a little silly and that is unedited. Our chat spelling is not always so great since we can’t edit. But it was a good discussion and I am really looking forward to next week.

If you’d like to read along, please see the reading and chat schedule.

Gilligan’s Wake. I love it so far. I’m only about 25 pages in but it’s reminding me a lot of At Swim-Two-Birds, one of my favorite books. Amazon’s description doesn’t even really give you the half of it:

In Gilligan’s Wake, Esquire columnist Tom Carson takes a shaky premise—20th-century American culture as seen through the characters of Gilligan’s Island–and turns it into a feverishly imaginative jigsaw puzzle of a book. Each castaway has been given a bizarre, interconnected history, which they recount in the book’s seven chapters.

This fateful trip begins with Gilligan, who tells of his days writing beat poetry with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, only to awaken in a Minnesota mental institution. The Skipper relates how he spent World War II drinking cheap beer on PT boats with McHale and Jack Kennedy, who had “a grin like autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets in the middle.” In later stories, “beaming, imbecilic” Thurston recommends former chum Alger Hiss for his first government job, while spoiled Lovey has a morphine-inspired fling with The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. Brilliant bombshell Ginger (“My hips could have started the Timex folks weeping”) lands a B-movie career in L.A., and a memorable night at Frank Sinatra’s house. In between building the A-bomb, inventing the CIA, and generally dictating world events with his pals Roy Cohn and “Hank” Kissinger, the Professor bestows sexual favors on invalids. Finally, cheerful Mary-Ann, “the personification of America,” leaves her Kansas home to attend the Sorbonne, where she meets a handsome Frenchman and discovers she is unable to lose her virginity.

Along the way, Gilligan’s Wake’s elusive meta-narrator reveals himself through clues and exposition in his hallucinatory retelling of American history. Carson propels the novel with astute cultural criticisms and energetic prose, including rapid-fire wordplay and narrative echoes that recall Thomas Pynchon. The result is a multifaceted, uncertain, and dazzling voyage.

The references are kind of mind-boggling. I love it so far. Interesting reviews here and here. I would really love for the book club to read this one eventually.