further convalescent reading

[radfrac_archive]

I don't know why I didn't read Life of Pi when everyone else was. It might have been because everyone else was, though I like to think I really did graduate from high school all those years ago. I think I was worried that Martel wasn't going to pull off a difficult thing. There seemed lots of ways it could go wrong.

I think if I had read the book when I was seventeen it could have entered my pantheon of Amazing Books. At twice seventeen, I thought it good -- successful -- which sounds like a dull praise but is a high -- and its images resonant, worth turning over and gnawing at for a few days. It hasn't entered my system, though, as some books do, changing your chemistry forever. I do not seem to have begun believing in god.

In the spirit of fair play I should mention that my critical faculties (such as they are) may still be blunted by physical recovery -- Mark Strand's A Blizzard of One seemed dull and full of unremarkable insights a few days after surgery, but has gained in poetic merit as I have become more alert. An account of my reading may say more about what a recovering brain is like than what any of these books are like.

Have started Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden which, as it begins with a convalescence at the seaside, appeals. Various biographies float towards me through the library hold system, kindly navigated by inlandsea -- or borne on her currents we could say, if we were in the habit of saying things like that -- and, let's be honest, we are.

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Comments

LoP

[xcaro.livejournal.com]

Hey darling, I'm your bad friend who said they were going to call last weekend and still hasn't called. I'm not much on the phone these days and I just spent an hour on the phone with my dads, who I love, but goodness they just didn't hear the stress in my voice and wanted to talk about their stuff.

Anyway, I don't know if I told you this about when I was reading Life of Pi, I didn't realize it was fiction until the main character arrived at the island and I was just like ok, I was with you on the whole tiger in the boat thing, it's a bit difficult to believe, but this is a memoir, right? So I'm with you. But this island is entirely botanically impossible. It was around then that I finally looked at the back cover - my edition helpfully noted that the book had won some award ... for fiction.. Heh. I'm so clever.

Re: LoP

[radiantfracture]

That's wonderful. The vertigo of not knowing whether a story is True or not.

I think it's Immortaility where Kundera talks about (goes and looks things up) -- ah, that's funny, I thought it was Beethoven, but it seems to be Goethe -- and Bettina and I didn't know whether it was a historical Fact or something he made up -- this before it was the fashion to write books suggesting that all major historical figures solved crimes in their off-hours.

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