4 posts tagged “iain pears”
For Whom the Bell Tolls--Ernest Hemingway
It was never my intention to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, or any other Hemingway books, for that matter. I read A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises years ago. They were enjoyable books, but they left me feeling a bit let down. This was, after all, Ernest Hemingway, one of the titans of 20th century American literature...and yet his books didn't touch me like I thought they should.
Earlier this year I went to a huge booksale and found a hardback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was ragged and enveloped in the musty smell of basements. There was even some turquoise mold growing on some of the pages. I normally would stick a book like that right back on the shelf, but I noticed there were old pieces of paper sticking out of the side. I opened the book up and found that its previous owner had decorated the inside covers with pictures and articles about the 1943 movie adaptation starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. There were a couple loose pictures, but most of them had been pasted into the book itself. Some of them even folded out of the book. Some of the pictures were in color, but most of them came out of a local newspaper trying to promote the movie's October 8th, 1943 Cincinnati premiere at the Capitol Theater. It was just about the coolest thing I've ever found. I dropped $2 and took the book home with me.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is about an American partisan (Cooper) who's given the strategic mission of blowing up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War. He teams with a group of guerrilla fighters and falls in love with a girl in their charge (Bergman). The love story is kind of stilted in places, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book. Even with all the outdoor screwing and pet names, For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the best books about war that I've ever read. The only one I can think of that tops it is Norman Mailer's The Naked & the Dead.
It took me 471 stinky pages, but I finally understand all the hubbub about Ernest Hemingway. (If you're a doubter as I was, I challenge you to read Chapter 10 of For Whom the Bell Tolls.)
If on a winter's night a traveler--Italo Calvino
Simply put, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. This might sound like hyperbole, but I literally had butterflies in my stomach throughout much of it. It felt like the author had sat down 25+ years ago to write a book for me to enjoy today.
(Thanks to Scott for telling me about it.)
Death and Restoration--Iain Pears
Death and Restoration is the sixth book in Iain Pears' seven book Art History Mystery series. The series stars Flavia di Stefano, a high-ranking investigator in Rome's Art Theft Squad, and Jonathan Argyll, an art dealer and occasional professor. Just about the same thing happens in all the Art History Mysteries: a painting goes missing and Flavia is called in to investigate. Jonathan (who by the 6th book is Flavia's fiancé) supplements the investigation from a more academic perspective. His research usually turns up a previously hidden secret about the missing painting or a far-reaching conspiracy of some sort involving monks, Nazis, or museum curators. By the end, the painting is recovered, the international art community is shocked, and Flavia and Jonathan are one step closer to matrimonial bliss (or disfunction).
Death and Restoration has the couple investigating a burglary at a small Roman monastary. There are harmless-looking old lady art thieves, egomaniacal painting restorers, hired assassins, kidnappers, gullible monks, and a strange family whose members have been janitors at the monastary for 400 years. You know, the usual stuff.
If this kind of thing interests you, forget about Death and Restoration for awhile and start in on the first book in the series, The Raphael Affair. I accidentally started with the seventh book and it really goofed up my reading.
Icelander--Dustin Long
"Never judge a book by its cover." I often ignore that adage and read books solely because they look like they'd be good. Conversely, I often skip over books because they're poorly presented...they've got cheap paper, lame cover art, or a picture of Chuck Palahniuk on the back. I usually have pretty good success with this method. Unfortunately, I sometimes get taken in by packaging. That was the case with Dustin Long's Icelander. The braintrust over at McSweeney's Rectangulars took a poorly-written, convoluted Icelandic murder mystery and gave it perhaps the most beautiful cover ever. There's a gigantic fox overlooking a tiny cartoon town. The fox has real silver flecks in his coat that sparkle at certain angles. Fat snow flakes complete the scene. The blurb on the back calls the book "Nabokovian" and compares it to The Crying of Lot 49. Surely this is a book I'm meant to love.
Wrong.
Icelander was a mess of a book. It could have used a real editor as opposed to the editor "character" who kept interrupting the flow of the story with his comments and useless footnotes. The book was fun and creative in places, but as a whole it felt like Dustin Long was just throwing into the book all the tricks he'd picked up by reading other (far better) authors. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to make his book hip or post-modern or whatever, but he failed. Normally I'd sell a book like this back to Half Price Books. I'm going to keep it, though; it looks wonderful on my shelf.
I've been reading too much lately, so I've decided to divide this month's SIBR post into two parts. This is the first part and covers all my book-related activities up through October 19th. The second part will cover the rest of the month. I'll post it in a week or two.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The New York Trilogy--Paul Auster
- Angle of Repose--Wallace Stegner
- A Bend in the River--V.S. Naipaul
- Disgrace--J.M. Coetzee
- Blood Meridian--Cormac McCarthy
- Jar City--Arnaldur Indriðason (thanks to SteveP)
- The Book of Pilates--Joyce Gavin
- The Walking Dead: Vol.5--William Kirkman
- Pastoralia--George Saunders
- The Studs Lonigan Trilogy--James T. Farrell
- Ticknor--Sheila Heti
- The Middle Stories--Sheila Heti
BOOKS READ:
- Search Party: Collected Poems--William Matthews
William Matthews was a poet born in Cincinnati in 1942. He died ten years ago. I'm usually not much of a poetry reader, but my cousin recommended William Matthews to me and I decided to give him a try. I bought and read Search Party: Collected Poems. My favorite poems in the collection were the ones written about seeing Charles Mingus perform. I also enjoyed "The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives", "Nabokov's Death", and the hilarious "A Poetry Reading at West Point". Some of the later poems were too long and dense for me to figure out in the time I gave them. That's my fault, though.
- Giotto's Hand--Iain Pears
Giotto's Hand is the fifth book in Iain Pears' seven book Art History Mystery series. I made the mistake of reading the seventh book first, so the surprise twist at the end of Giotto's Hand wasn't as surprising as it otherwise would have been. It was still a good, quick read.
- McSweeney's #24
McSweeney's #24 was divided into two sections. The first featured a bunch of authors trying to convince me that Don Barthelme was a great writer. I read his 60 Stories collection last year and didn't care for it at all. In fact, it is probably my least favorite short story collection ever. For some reason, though, I didn't mind reading other authors fawning over Barthelme. I may not enjoy his writing, but it sounds like he was an interesting man.
The second section of McSweeney's consisted of six short stories full of violence and murders. I don't want to spoil anything, but bullets fly in all six stories. It was very un-McSweeney's, but it made for good reading anyway. I especially enjoyed "Bored to Death" by Jonathan Ames.
- The New York Trilogy--Paul Auster
My brother recommended The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. It's a collection of three interrelated detective novellas. These aren't your typical detective stories, though; these are flat-out weird. They actually reminded me a bit of Franz Kafka's novels The Castle and The Trial. All the characters seemed to be mentally unstable with a slightly screwy grasp on reality. I think The New York Trilogy is supposed to be "postmodern", but I've honestly never understood what that term meant. I always thought it was just a fancy thing that grad students said to get me to punch them in the throat.
But anyway, the stories were confusing, but ultimately worth reading. I didn't really "get" the book until I finished it and was able to see how the stories and characters were related. Even now, I'm not sure I understood everything.
- God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian--Kurt Vonnegut
My uncle told me about God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is based on a series of brief essays originally aired on NPR. In them, Vonnegut repeatedly "dies", interviews famous dead people in the afterlife, and then gets brought back to life by Jack Kevorkian so he (Vonnegut) can tell us what the dead people had to say.
I went up to the bookstore to buy God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and saw that it was a thin volume printed in a huge font with a lot of blank filler pages. I sat down in a chair and read the entire book in the store. It only took me 20 minutes and I saved $10.
- Disgrace--J.M. Coetzee
I have a book called 1000 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It features essays on books the editors consider to be essential reading. In skimming through the book, one of the things I noticed was that there was a lot of J.M. Coetzee in there...eleven books, in fact. I'd never read anything by the author before, so I went out and bought a copy of Disgrace. I picked it over his other books because it had a "Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize" emblem on the front.
Disgrace is about a South African professor whose life falls apart after he has an affair with a student. He loses his job and ends up going to live with his daughter on her farm. He volunteers at an animal shelter and tries to write an opera about Lord Byron. Just when he thinks it can't get any worse, real tragedy strikes.
Disgrace was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Maybe the 1000 Books editors were on to something.
- The Book of Pilates--Joyce Gavin
This was just a book I bought to familiarize myself with the basic concepts and techniques of Pilates. It served its purpose and one of the models was cute. There's not much else to say about it.
- Blood Meridian--Cormac McCarthy
I was out book shopping and a crazy lady came up to me and told me I should read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I've enjoyed McCarthy in the past and I'm always willing to listen to crazy people, so I bought a copy. Wow! I thought No Country for Old Men was a violent book; it doesn't even come close to Blood Meridian.
Blood Meridian follows the adventures of "the kid", a young gunslinger who hires on with the Glanton gang, a real-life gang that was contracted to kill Indians near the Mexican border in the mid-1800s. The Glantons scalp their kills and get money from the government for each scalp they bring in. Before you know it, they're killing everybody...men, women, children, infants, the elderly, horses, donkeys, each other, etc. Glanton himself is one of the most depraved characters I've read, but he pales in comparison to Judge Holden, a huge, strangely gifted man who leaves a trail of raped and murdered children wherever he goes. The Judge makes Patrick Bateman look like an altar boy.
I must admit that I didn't enjoy Blood Meridian. It wasn't even the violence that turned me off; I just had trouble following the story. The other Cormac McCarthy books I've read were easy reads. Blood Meridian was a tough one and it seemed even tougher because I wasn't expecting to have to concentrate so much. There was also a lot of untranslated Spanish that gave me trouble. I don't quit books once I've begun them, though, so I pushed on through. I'm glad I did. The last chapter was absolutely amazing. It was one of the best endings I've ever read. It was so good that I'm seriously considering going back and reading the entire book over again.
CURRENTLY READING:
- The World Without Us--Alan Weisman
- The Middle Stories--Sheila Heti
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The Voice at 3:00 A.M.--Charles Simic
- 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die--Peter Boxall (editor)
- The World Without Us--Alan Weisman
- Comedy By Numbers--Eric Hoffman & Gary Rudoren
- Farmer--Jim Harrison
- McSweeney's #24
BOOKS READ:
- The Last Judgement--Iain Pears
- A Good Day to Die--Jim Harrison
- A Soldier of the Great War--Mark Helprin
- The Double/The Gambler--Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Appointment in Samarra--John O'Hara
- The Voice at 3:00 A.M.--Charles Simic
I went to Colorado for a camping/hiking trip at the end of August. I brought two books with me, The Last Judgement by Iain Pears and A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison. The Last Judgement is another one in Iain Pears' Art History Mysteries series. I've already written about a couple of them here, so I'm not going to go into much detail. Let's just say that they're my go-to books for traveling. They're fun and they make the time go by quickly. I read this one on a plane, in a tent, and later on an air mattress in my cousin's spare bedroom. It was good, but it obviously didn't make much of an impression on me. It's been less than a month since I read it, and I've already forgotten the plot. I think it had something to do with Nazis and stolen paintings. Yeah, that's it.
The other book I brought along on my trip was A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison. I took it because I was sure I was going to die in the woods and I thought it would be cool if they found the book and my broken body at the bottom of a rocky ravine or half-eaten by bears or something morbid like that. It didn't happen, though. I didn't get to the book until the plane trip back home. My little joke would have worked in a plane wreck, too, unless there was a lot of fuel and everything burned up...(I'm getting off topic here, sorry).
A Good Day to Die is a book about a shattered poet who goes on a cross-country road trip with a deranged, drug-addled Vietnam veteran and the vet's girlfriend. They drive from Florida out to the Grand Canyon to blow up dams. You get the idea--an on the road, drug-fueled love triangle complete with lots of dynamite. It sounds stupid, but that's because I'm doing a crap job writing this. It was actually a very good book. It was my second Jim Harrison novel, and I'm definitely going to read a third.
Most of September was spent on Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. As the title would suggest, it's a story about a veteran of the First World War. He tells his life story to a young factory worker while the two of them walk along an Italian road after a mishap with a mean bus driver. It's an 860 page book; they're walking for days. A Soldier of the Great War was a good book, and it's the best fictional account of WWI that I've ever read. Still, I had a few issues with the book. There were a couple places where the author changed his writing style and tried to become Catch-22 era Joseph Heller. Those places didn't work. I also wasn't very interested in the detailed descriptions of mountaineering techniques that popped up throughout the book. I shouldn't complain, though. For every slightly annoying part, there were a dozen brilliant sections that more than made up for it. I'd definitely recommend A Soldier of the Great War to Helprin fans or readers interested in fictional depictions of WWI. It was a little long, but ultimately worth reading.
The Everyman's Library edition of Dostoevsky's The Double and The Gambler had been sitting on my shelf since last year. It was actually the last of my unread books from 2006 and I'd been putting it off. I was interested in reading two Dostoevsky novellas when I bought the book, but that interest had long since faded. The Double was about a government clerk who gradually gets replaced by his doppelganger. His double looks just like him, has the same name, and works in the same building. It's an interesting idea, and may even have been original when Dostoevsky published it in 1846, but now it comes off like a Twilight Zone retread. I wasn't impressed.
The second novella in the volume was The Gambler. The story behind this novella is just as good as the novella itself. Dostoevsky had a lot of gambling debt and had to make a deal with a corrupt publisher. He got 3,000 roubles in exchange for giving the man the rights to publish a volume of his (Dostoevsky's) complete works. In addition, the man demanded a new novel. If the new novel wasn't delivered in time, then the publisher would become the owner of everything Dostoevsky had written up to that point...and everything he'd write in the next nine years. Dostoevsky kicks ass, though, and he wrote The Gambler in less than a month. Take that, you shark!
John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra was one of those rare books that I couldn't put down. It's a 250 page book, but I read it in just a day. The first thing I thought when I finished it was, "Why in the world did they call it Appointment in Samarra?". None of the characters had an appointment and the word "Samarra" didn't appear in the novel once. I was even more perplexed when I looked up "Samarra" in the dictionary and found out it's a town in Iraq. I did some more research and I realized that in skipping over John Updike's introduction at the beginning of the book, I'd also managed to skip over the epigraph. That epigraph explains the the title; it also gives away the ending of the novel. I'm glad I accidentally skipped it.
But anyway, Appointment in Samarra is a great book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes F. Scott Fitzgerald or novels of the 1930s. It's one of the best I've read. It also features the most hilarious line I've read this entire year. I actually laughed outloud at a novel. I don't remember the last time that happened. Other than that one line, it's not a funny book at all. It's about Julian English, a successful and respected man who tosses a highball into the face of an annoying guy at a party. Of course, all sorts of horrific ramifications result.
Joe Pernice wrote a song called "Wherein Obscurely" for the first Pernice Brothers album. The song was inspired by a Charles Simic poem of the same name. Sometimes that's all it takes for me to develop an interest in an author. I bought The Voice at 3:00 A.M. for a few bucks, and it was well worth it. It's a collection of Charles Simic poetry going back to 1986. My favorites were "The Big War" and "Cabbage". I once tried to write about a volume of poetry; it didn't turn out well, so that's all I'm going to say about Charles Simic or The Voice at 3:00 A.M.
CURRENTLY READING:
- Search Party: Collected Poems--William Matthews
- Giotto's Hand--Iain Pears
This supplemental column covers all the reading and book-buying that took place while I was out-of-town from June 22nd through July 1st.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Cat's Cradle--Kurt Vonnegut
- Led Zeppelin--Erik Davis
- Black Ghost Apple Factory--Jeremy Tinder
BOOKS READ:
- The Bernini Bust--Iain Pears
- No One Belongs Here More Than You--Miranda July
- On The Road--Jack Kerouac (audio)
- Black Ghost Apple Factory--Jeremy Tinder
- Cat's Cradle--Kurt Vonnegut
Iain Pears is famous for writing An Instance of the Fingerpost, a Rashomon-like historical mystery that was published in 1997. Before he wrote that, he toiled away in relative obscurity as an art historian and the author of a series of mystery novels that takes place in the world of Italian art thievery. This series is collectively known as the Art History Mysteries. There are seven books in the series and I took the third one, The Bernini Bust, with me on my trip to Idaho. The Art History Mysteries are my favorite books for traveling. They don't require much thought, so they're easy to read in an airport or on a plane or train. In addition, they're pocket-sized so they don't take up much space or weight in the luggage.
Although these are mystery novels, they slightly turn the genre on its side. For example, the main character, an art dealer named Jonathan Argyll, could have solved the entire mystery about a third of the way through The Bernini Bust if he'd only been paying attention to what another character was telling him. Argyll was thinking about Flavia di Stefano, an Italian art detective (and potential love interest), at the time and failed to pick up on the hints that were being dropped right in front of him. Jonathan and Flavia eventually wrapped up the case, but it took them an additional 200 pages.
I read The Bernini Bust on the flight from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City. I was supposed to have a two hour layover in Salt Lake, but it turned into the longest seven hours I've ever spent in my life. I finished up The Bernini Bust while sitting in the airport and had to start in on the only other book I'd brought along, No One Belongs Here More Than You, a short story collection by Miranda July.
I enjoyed Miranda July's movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it was really her short film, Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, that hooked me (it's available on the first issue of Wholphin and is well worth checking out). I read a couple of her short stories as a result. I enjoyed them both and picked up No One Belongs Here More Than You for my trip. I was very happy with the book. It exceeded my every expectation. Miranda July has a unique, almost demented, point-of-view, and her short stories were a pleasure to read...especially "Majesty" and "Something That Needs Nothing".
I originally read Jack Kerouac's On the Road during my month-long Beat phase back in college. My Beat phase only lasted a month largely because I didn't care for On the Road. I still hear people rave about the book, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit it. I bought the unabridged Blackstone Audiobooks version as read by Tom Parker. I'd never heard a book before, but I thought listening to On the Road on the road would be appropriate.
The On the Road audiobook consists of seven cassette tapes and lasts about nine and a half hours. We had over forty hours to kill, so we had no difficulty making it all the way through. I'm happy to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the audiobook. I liked it a lot more than I remember liking the book itself. Maybe it was Tom Parker's voice. Maybe it was the fact that we were driving through places actually mentioned in the book. Maybe it was the twelve years that have gone by since I first read it. I'm not really sure. I enjoyed it a lot, though.
My favorite line took place in Chapter 12 when Sal Paradise is about to meet his Mexican girlfriend, Terry, for the first time.
A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Tell me about it, Sal. That line is always going to remind me of the Lithuanian girl cleaning the bathrooms in an Iowa rest stop...and the curvy gal from the tacqueria...and the Korean waitress in Ithaca...and...well, you get the idea.
My long layover in Salt Lake City really messed up my reading schedule for the trip. By the time I got to Boise, I had already finished The Bernini Bust and most of No One Belongs Here More Than You. Those two books were supposed to last me ten days. It was clear to me that I needed another book. I wandered around the indie bookstores and eventually found one that had a copy of Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a book that's been on my list for a couple years, but that I'd never gotten around to. It's got 127 short chapters, so it seemed like a good book to read in the car (I have a short attention span for car reading). Strangely enough, some of the book takes place at Cornell University, the final destination on our cross-country drive.
Cat's Cradle was a good book, but all the talk of karasses and sinookas and granfaloons annoyed me a bit. I'll take Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions any day. I ended up finishing Cat's Cradle about two minutes before my plane landed in Cincinnati at the very end of my trip. I thought for a second that it would be kind of cool to die in a fiery crash just seconds after finishing a Vonnegut novel, but it didn't turn out that way. It wouldn't have been cool anyway; I'm horribly frightened of fire.
The only other book I read on my trip was a 50 page comic by Jeremy Tinder called Black Ghost Apple Factory. I picked it up at an Ithaca comicbook store called Comics For Collectors. I'm not usually a fan of comics, but I hid in the store from a torrential rainstorm and felt like I had to buy something. Black Ghost Apple Factory only cost $5, so I bought it. It features stories about robots who don't say "I love you", a young man who gets mauled by his roommate (who happens to be a bear), a bunny who's bored with his naked human girlfriend, and a kitty who has a traumatic experience at the vet. I laughed out loud a few times, so it was definitely worth the $5.
CURRENTLY READING:
- Babbitt--Sinclair Lewis
