The Three Books I'm Currently Working Through...

BLOT: (30 Oct 2011 - 09:37:08 PM)

The Three Books I'm Currently Working Through...

I thought, just maybe, after grad school I would attack reading with something like a ferociousness, but as it turns out I have been still just a tad in a mental malaise that is one part Thinking About the Future and probably two parts Just Kind of Mentally Tired. Since my graduation this past August, the two months following have only involved about a dozen books. Which is probably a good number, considering, but feels kind of small (I normally average about 2-3 books per week). At any rate, the time has come to get to talking about books again, and so I'd thought I'd start a Sunday feature (possibly a one-time deal) in which I talk about what books I'm currently on, or have just currently finished.

The big one, first up, is Murakami's 1Q84:

This is a sizable "book" which is actually a trilogy of books bound together as one in the American version. I am less than half way through the first book, and still a bit confused as to what is happening. I won't spoil much, if anything, but it involves an unpublished [or only mildly published, I forget] writer who is given the chance to rewrite a tale that is written poorly but to great impact. Upon meeting the writer of this tale, though, he becomes some obsessed by her weirdness[es]. Then you have the female main character, whose job I'll let you find out if you choose to read because it is still sort of explaining it where I am at, who takes a desperate path [an emergency exit off of a busy road] to make an appointment one day and begins to find a world not quite like her own on the other side. The weird youth of the guy's tale and the weird happenings of the gal's tale are both just sufficient enough though I think I'm at the point where it will crank up...and it has been cranking up for a bit.

Then there are these two short story compilations, Ramsey Campbell's Dark Companions and Robert Aickman's The Powers of Darkness:

Powers of Darkness is my first Aickman foray. I like it. He is subtle and builds up mostly on the back of things being out of place, intrusions into the everday. He is not as subtle as some make him out to be, though, and though his stories often have a sense of allegorical or metaphorical punch, I think they make fine little horror nuggets that just so happen to be appreciable on a more literay scale. Dark Companions is not my first shot into Campbell, but is one of my favorites. The sheer mass of stories (at 400pp with each story taking up about 20pp at the most, and sometimes fewer, it is a big collection that only covers a relatively short time period in his career) takes a bit to get through, I am now about the halfway mark after a fortnight of reading, and a lot of the same tricks are used—bulbous things, glimpses through rainy windows, hints of spidery scratchings on the wall above—but a fair amount of different hues—perhaps a deeper mix of hues than a wider, mind you—are created out of this box of crayons, and I like that. They work together, the two collections, because both are endowed with a sense of outsiderness, a sense of normal interactions with human beings being just the weirdest thing, and in some cases it is quite amazing how much they imply rather than explicitly state. I am thinking of doing a somewhat scholarly paper on the Campbellian/Aickmanian protag in light of autism research and so forth.

Well, that's it for this week...let's see if I can get this knocked out and have different ones next week. *crosses fingers*

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011