Soooo. Yesterday at work I picked up The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, and ignoring my personal ethics of reading (i.e., try not to read more than one book at a time), ended up reading a good half of it last night after my DVD player refused to read my current disc of Mad Men.
A few things, first. I've been busy working (busy for me means working about 35 hours a week, sometimes even 40), and when I'm not doing that or hanging out with the two friends I have left in Canada, I've mostly been watching TV. In my defense, it's mostly been Mad Men, which is stunningly good, but still. Given that I work in publishing and also at a bookstore, I feel a little guilty about how little I've been reading. I keep picking up books at work-- 30% staff discount, it's trouble-- and not reading them.
That said, I've been slogging through Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie for honestly the last month and a half. Embarrassing. Not to mention that I failed to finish the last book I was reading-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami-- because, even though I was enjoying it, it was just taking too damn long. I brought it to Chicago with me, figuring that spending 40+ hours in a van would be the perfect opportunity to finish a 600 page novel that I was halfway through. However, a combination of friends, WireTap and my apparently inexhaustible delight in staring out the window of a moving vehicle all conspired to ensure I did not, in fact, get any reading at all done on that trip. That was at the beginning of August.
Which brings us to my current book, which I found on top of a pile of books that had just come in at work. I love books about reading, and I assume I love Nick Hornby although I've never actually read any of his books, but I have seen High Fidelity like fourteen times. And, as I said, my shitty ancient DVD player wouldn't read Mad Men, and the book is so small, so I crawled into bed with that instead.
And it was so comforting and delightful! Reading another reader writing about how, sometimes, even if you really like the book you're reading, you are just not that into it, really helped with the guilt. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes the thought of sitting down and turning pages, for whatever reason, seems repulsive. You think about all the times you whipped through a novel in three days and loved every minute of it-- like when I read Middlesex this summer-- and wonder "What happened?" All in all, the almost 100 pages I've read have been reassuring to me as a reader.
So, with the hope of getting back on the Book Horse in mind, I think I am going to put aside Wednesdays as my day to myself, to read. My roommates aren't home, so I can sit in my armchair, which would not fit into my room, make a cup of tea, and just go for it for a few hours.
It is also hilarious, which brings me to another point. Most of the novels I have read or intend to read (and so, I suspect, most novels at all) are just not very funny. Which seems odd, because I would say that I'm someone who values fun in the things I enjoy. Like music-- some of my very favourite bands-- Spoon, The Decemberists, Of Montreal-- when it comes down to it, one of the main reasons I like these bands because they're fun. It often seems like, if literature is going to be serious, it has to be heavy. Like, for example, some of my other favourite things. The National. Arcade Fire. Mad Men. Not funny.
Obviously there are exceptions, but I wish more so-called "serious" literature was more fun, if beauty and humour could exist side by side more often in literature. And maybe it's not even true that they don't. Maybe it's a cultural construct-- there's Art, and then there's things that make you laugh. And maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or maybe I can't find the humour in beautiful, serious books (or the beauty in funny ones). But I think I'm pretty safe in my assessment of Ondaatje as Not Funny.
Not intentionally, anyway. Some of those sex scenes are out of control.
