Regeneration. Some day when I am not in school anymore, I am going to take a blood oath to not read any more books or watch any more movies or listen to any goddamned songs about World War I. Because if there is a more depressingly-depicted era in all of human history, I don’t want to know about it.

I really loved this book, both on audio and in print (I went through it once in each edition). I am not sure that I will survive the next two books in the trilogy, though, at least not without powerful antidepressants.

Absalom, Absalom!. This is my favorite book in the whole world, and I think it is the best and most important and complete book written about America and the mythology of the south. That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? I defended it in the chat transcripts from our Faulkner seminar. I think Faulkner’s exploration of the whole Gatsby dream and the man-versus-nature ethos is really fascinating. Thomas Sutpen doesn’t conquer the wilderness and build a dynasty out of nothing; he “tears violently” a plantation from the earth. That’s good stuff. We had some disagreement about whether Faulkner was as big a sexist as some of his narrators are, but I think the women here are silent and ghostly on purpose, because they are trapped in the mythos of the south, and that’s no way to live.

During our chats I wound up wondering if Faulkner conceived this book as an answer to Gone With the Wind, because a side-by-side comparison is pretty fascinating. In Faulkner’s world, Scarlet O’Hara could not exist, not because she is so unlikely but because Margaret Mitchell’s pretty fantasyland is so unlikely. Absalom is about sex and rape and violence and the ownership of black men’s and all women’s bodies; it addresses the poison behind the southern myths. The book is brilliant and beautiful and ugly and really hard to read, but it is my favorite book and Faulkner is my favorite author and I forgive him for using “effluvium” seven times in three hundred pages.

We have just finished our Faulkner seminar over at TUS, and I have to call this one a huge success. We had so much fun with Faulkner that the participants are now starting up a sort of Great American Novel reading club, inspired by a couple of recent threads: Huck Finn versus Beloved, and . the Great American Novel. The latter started as a discussion of The Grapes of Wrath and wound up turning into a discussion of the criteria for declaring a book the Great American Novel. The most popular contenders: Beloved, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, and my own choice, Absalom, Absalom!.

It was a good thread, and between that discussion and the Faulkner seminar we seem to have sparked an interest in literature of the south. Some of the regulars are putting together a mini seminar on Beloved, and we are going to read more Faulkner in the spring. I suspect we will see some O’Connor and Welty and McCullers showing up in discussions, as well.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I liked this one more than The Newly Born Woman but I am a little embarrassed trying to come up with anything intelligent to say about it. So we are adopting a new rule here at Outside of Dog, which is that any time I have nothing to say about a book, I will just pick out a quote (preferably a quote about dogs) and you can decide for yourselves.

Here is your quote:

We need dogs to understand this strange, ambivalent relation we have to love — hatred. I don’t have a dog. I avoid having a dog. I have always been aware that I have avoided having dogs. A dog is a threat. What is threatening about dogs is their terrible love. You learn this the moment you see a particular dog. Some dogs are like human beings, full of hatred, but most dogs are bundles of love. This infinite, complete, and limitless giving of love is exhausting for a human being. We are a mixture of love and its contrary. Apparently there is no such mixture in a dog’s love. Poe wrote “The Black Cat” about this: a cat’s love that is so infinite the narrator comes to hate the cat.

Meeting a dog you suddenly see the abyss of love. Such limitless love doesn’t fit our economy. We cannot cope with such an open, superhuman relation.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I am always the last person to read the hot new books. Jeremy bought me this one for my birthday after reading the first few pages at the bookstore. When I started it last night, I got a little mad at him because he hadn’t warned me that something very bad happens to the dog in the night-time.

(Warning: incoming spoilers for the very first paragraph of this novel.)

Me: “You thought this would be a nice book for me to read.”

Him: “Yes. You said you wanted to read it.”

Me: “But I didn’t know what it was about.”

Him: “I thought you did.”

Me: “I thought it was about a dog.”

Him: “It is about a dog.”

Me: “It is about a dog that gets killed in the first paragraph.”

Him: “Well, yeah. But it’s a dog.”

Me: “A dog with a pitchfork sticking out of its side.”

Him: “It’s still a dog.”

Me: “You thought this would make a nice birthday present for me. ‘Happy birthday, Beth! Have a nightmare!’”

Also, he did not tell me that it is about a poodle. Which barely counts as a dog anyway.

Ernest & Ethel. I will never be a committed fan of graphic novels because the format makes me a little impatient, and I come away feeling unsatisfied. I enjoyed this but I don’t have much to say about it. I kind of hated the fast-forward, no-transitions style; I wanted some connections and I felt a little jerked around. I might have more to say once I understand why my professor had us read this, but for now the best thing I can say about the book is that the ending made me tear up a little.

Père Goriot. I read this last year but I am now listening to an audio version because the book club will start discussing it tomorrow. I thought this would be a good book to hear read aloud, but even though I have read it before all the characters are kind of jumbling together. Then again, I remember the same thing happening when I read it the old-fashioned way, so maybe the early chapters of this book are just confusing.

Enduring Love. Not a bad audiobook, and certainly entertaining, but I had the same problems with this one that I have had with every Ian McEwan book I’ve read to date. The first problem is the tone: I always have a hard time determining if the book is meant to convey an arch, ironic tone, or whether it is all deadly serious. The second problem is one of characterization: once upon a time I would have said that McEwan writes unlikeable characters, but I don’t think that is actually the problem. I think the problem is that he writes unlikely characters, characters whose motivations spring from the necessities of plot rather than from any organic development. No one in this book makes any sense except for the crazy stalker, and he only makes sense because his madness is explained. I understand that the fundamental irrationality of love is something that McEwan is exploring here, but that doesn’t change the fact that none of these characters behave like actual people; they behave like characters in a very clever novel.

Perhaps I am missing the brilliance, but I continue to think that McEwan is one of the most overrated authors around.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I’ve just started this one. I kind of hate Cixous. I will try to keep an open mind.

(But I don’t promise to try very hard.)

Enduring Love. Here is a fine way to start the semester: listen to your first assignment as an Audible download. Cut me some slack here, though. I just finished a 45-page brief for the California Supreme Court, and I have another one due next month. Listening to this on audio is the only way I am going to finish it by Monday. I have a paperback edition, as well, and I’m skimming it to catch anything I’ve missed.

I kind of hate Ian McEwan but I am enjoying this book as much as I’ve enjoyed any of his novels. His characters depress me, though, because their essential sliminess always feels artificial and mannered, a sliminess invented by the novelist to serve his plot needs rather than any real comment on human nature. This one is at least not as bad as Amsterdam, though, at least not so far.

On Becoming A Novelist. Those of you who have been around for a while will recall how I felt about the last Gardner book I read. This one wasn’t so bad. In fact, I found it rather encouraging, not even counting the outdated and overly-rosy view of the publishing industry Gardner presents.

Or rather, I would have found this book encouraging had I read it ten years ago. The section in which Gardner speaks frankly about all the time a writer needs for just mulling, and the uninterrupted blocks of time for writing and outlining and thinking, was my favorite part because it confirmed what I already knew (but felt a little guilty about): I don’t have time to write. The book made me think that maybe I could have been a writer, had I gone a different direction ten or fifteen years ago. Now, I can barely find the time to write a two-paragraph review of this book, much less finish start the short story I have to turn in on October 5.

Lots of very earnest and kind of stupid people will tell you that all you need to do is set aside half an hour every day to write. Those people usually mean that they watch half an hour less reality television when they are writing something. Those people are full of shit.

I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. I really enjoyed this novel, although I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s great literature of any kind. Alameddine, a male author, presents the autobiography of Sarah Nour El-Din, a Lebanese-American artist attempting to recount her life but never getting past the first chapter. The novel consists of these abandoned first chapters, and in each one Sarah finds a different focus, a different voice, a different point of view, or just a different starting point.

With less compelling subject matter the first-chapters device could come across as gimmicky or cute, but I thought it played out with reasonable subtlety and created a convincing portrait of a woman approaching middle age and trying to make sense of her self. I also really appreciated the fact that the novel is not only the increasingly familiar story of a person caught between two cultures and two points in history — it is that, but I think Alameddine is doing something more interesting here. Although Sarah’s personal, religious, and family history are all crucial pieces of the puzzle here, in many ways Alameddine could have written this same novel about anyone with much the same effect. You could almost call this novel an especially fine example of postmodern chick lit. Also, it is big on the melodrama.

That said, I loved Sarah and I found the contemporary, pre- and post-civil war Druze cultural elements to be totally fascinating, mostly because I know nothing about Lebanon or Syria or most of the history and myth recounted here and there in the novel. The prose is occasionally a little rough or stilted, but I attributed that to Sarah’s attempts to find an authorial voice that suits her.