So, it’s been awhile: I’m still reading Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, but that’s because I lost it for about two weeks. It lay lonely and abandoned in the car. But anywho, during the past month or so I’ve read a couple of fantastic short books while continuing to trudge through The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner.
The first and perhaps most enjoyable was Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (editor of The Believer), a stark tale of searching for ones identity and past in the arctic wastes of Lapland. It’s in paperback at the moment, so take a look if you like writing that has a keen since of rhythm and doesn’t pull its punches.
I also read The Night in Question, a story collection by Tobias Wolff. I had previously read his novel, Old School back in the spring and thought it was one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and I felt the same way about his stories. He has a very intimate connection between language and story that many literary authors fail to grasp.
Which leads me today’s purchases: the current issue of Poets & Writers; a marked down hardback copy of Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (whom, though at times absurdly quirky, is one of my favorite novelists – he also has an essay in the current issue of Granta), and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff, another story collection. So that’s what’s on the plate currently.
One of my goals this year has been to work on reading some classics of American fiction during the past century; so far I’ve gotten through some of J.D. Salinger, some of Plath (poetry, but oh well), still working on Gardner. I hope to read some Kerouac as well as Raymond Carver at some point, but I’m not in too big a hurry. I’ve got Seperate Flights by Andre Dubus waiting in the wings at some point, as well as debut novels by Mischa Berlinski and Olga Grushin.
Posted by nathanknapp 
a break. The Polysyllabic Spree came shipped used from an Amazon seller and I started in on it at about 3 or so this afternoon and just ploughed through all fifteen or so essays in basically a day-long sitting. Time spent with Hornby is always time well spent, always very funny and at times shockingly insightful. He’s sort of a modern-day Wodehouse, at least when it comes to downright pithiness. Polysyllabic is the first collection of his columns in the Believer, on his (hillarious) book-buying and -reading habits.
Sunlight Dialogues. I’ve got a hardback version of the first edition (seventh printing), and it is a very, very large book – clocking it at 660 of the literally largest and word-filled pages you could ever ask for. (I saw a paperback of the book and it was at 1000 pages – and in tiny print!) I read thirty pages in a day and I feel as if I have landed a knockout punch, but after that I’m so worn out I can’t muster a single page for three days. He comes with a right hook – the densest, most complex prose a thinking person could ever ask for. However, I’m convinced that I’m going to be positively jubilant after I’ve climbed this mountain of American literature – I already feel as if my mind has been hit with an atom bomb.
Among other things, I’m reading the Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, which are excellent (especially the latter poems, right before she committed suicide in ’63) as well as a biography of her marriage with her poet-husband, Ted Hughes, aptly titled, Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook.
Perhaps even better than sitting on the back deck in the shade reading a good book would be sitting inside listening to music made in Seattle, reading the same book, while it rains oh-so-softly. Coffee in hand. In the half-light that Mom always tells me will ruin my eyes. Yes. It is.
shade. On a warm (but not too warm) sunny day and a cup of coffee (Starbucks Pike Place brew). Currently working on The Inhabited World by David Long.
