So last year I did a quick post on my 'Regrets of the Year' --- that is, the books that came out that I wanted to read, but couldn't because of this stupid quest. I actually think it'll be really handy in another couple of years when I'm finished with my list, because it'll stop me forgetting about things I was intrigued by, but never had a chance to investigate further. I might be late to the party on all these, but that's not gonna stop me, dammit!
So, here are my biggest regrets of 2012:
Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías.
Aaaaand already I'm sorta cheating. This wasn't a 2012 book, it just came to my attention this year. Anyway, it looks and sounds incredible. After splitting up with his wife, Jacques Deza begins to discover he has an incredible gift: he can interpret subtle cues in a person's face today to predict what they will do tomorrow. He can, on a very small, personal level, predict the future. Then he gets recruited to a spy organisation of dubious purpose, and the whole thing turns into a weird, philosophical thriller.
'Philosophical thriller' sounds right up my alley. I was close to buying this instead of Crime and Punishment, but it's friggin' huge, being sold in three separate volumes that total about 1300 pages. However, one of my colleagues at work flew through the lot in about two weeks, so it seems like it's still pretty page-turner-y.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.
Billy Lynn just has one of those set-ups that seems kind of perfect. After surviving a famous skirmish in the Iraq war, the remaining members of a heroic company are doing a whirlwind publicity tour back home. Scheduled to appear with Destiny's Child at halftime at a Dallas Cowboys game, they have to spend the day schmoozing with mega-rich corporate types, trying to score with the cheerleaders, humouring the hulking war-hungry players ... all while trying to protect the secret of what really happened over there.
I don't know about you, but I want to read that fucking book. It helps that it's been getting fantastic reviews, and is apparently hilarious. We run a book club at the store, and the fact that it divided our (generally pretty staid) book clubbers is another plus for me (don't tell them that).
HHhH by Laurent Binet.
Another war novel, this time set in WWII, it deals with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's coldest, cruelest lieutenants. The two men responsible, Jozef Gabćik and Jan Kubiš, were themselves discovered and killed almost straight away, and many details of their lives and their heroism have been lost to history.
Binet's novel, though exhaustively researched, isn't shy about admitting that there are elements of the story that will remain forever unknowable. Binet deals with this by inserting himself into the book, debating whether it is a greater tribute to imagine the interior lives of the two assassins, transforming them from real men into legends, or if it is a better, truer course to only write what is definitively known. So as well as a thriller, it becomes a meditation on how we remember our history, and how our selective remembrances can change the past.
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood.
I was kind of 50/50 on this one: I liked the sound of the plot (a group of brilliant students at Cambridge get carried away by their leader's macabre experiments to do with music and death), and I loved the authors getting name-checked on the book's jacket (it was compared to Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith and Evelyn Waugh), but it could so easily have been one of those over-hyped debuts that has publishers hot under the collar, but never delivers. But then one of our regular customers, whose opinions are pretty close to my own, read it and loved it. I'll always be looking for another Secret History, hopefully this is a worthy successor.
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus.
I've heard wildly disparate things about this one, and some people have flat out hated it, but the basic concept is enough to keep me intrigued: a new kind of virus sweeps the globe, making parents get gravely ill at the sound of their children's voices. I don't know much more about it than that (other than the fact it's got a really beautiful cover ... yes, I know that's how you shouldn't judge books), but that's enough to get its hooks into me. The possibility for exploring some really interesting stuff to do with families and the ties that bind us, and just what would happen when suddenly the world's children hold all the power. And god, so so pretty ...
So those are my 'want-to-reads' from 2012. Any of you guys read anything brilliant this year that I should add to the list?
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Persuasion by Jane Austen
books to go: 76
Before I start yakking away about The Iliad, I thought I'd take a moment to talk translation, and how important the translation is when reading an ancient work like this, and (not coincidentally) how I'm a total cheating arse.
The many different translations of Homer that abound in English mean that each new reader, if they bother to inform themselves, has a choice about what kind of Iliad they wish to read: the Richmond Lattimore translation is the most literal, taking as few liberties with the Greek as possible; the E.V. Rieu transforms poetry into prose; the Alexander Pope is apparently brilliant, but is more Pope's poem than Homer's; and so on, and on. How you respond to the work is obviously mostly to do with Homer, but in a situation where so many differing translations exist, your translator of choice will have an effect on your reading.
I own both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but both of them were books I picked up from the store for free (damaged Penguin books don't need to get sent back, so we get to take them if we want ... it's both a blessing and a curse, trust me), and I didn't pay any attention to whose translations I was shoving in my bag. I'd always intended, once the time came to read them, to do a bit of research, figure out which translations I wanted to read, and replace my copies if necessary. So, yes, I bought a book, which is technically cheating I suppose. But my copy of The Iliad turned out to be the first ever English translation, completed by George Chapman in around 1615. Reading a Shakespeare-era translation of a 3000 year old poem, which I'm already dreading reading anyway? Umm, no thanks.
I ended up going with Stephen Mitchell's recent translation, which seemed from the reviews to be doing its utmost to be accessible. A quick glance at page one confirmed my impressions.
Let's compare them. Here's the opening of the Chapman translation:
Achilles' baneful wrath - resound, O goddess - that impos'd
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls loos'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave:
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.
And here's the same passage from Mitchell:
The rage of Achilles - sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Begin at the time when bitter words first divided
that king of men, Agamemnon, and godlike Achilles.
It's pretty remarkable that Chapman managed to fashion the entire Iliad (more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry) into rhyming couplets. But, being that this is the first toe I'm dipping into the waters of Classical Greek literature (okay, second toe: I was in a production of Lysistrata at school), I figured 'accessible' should be the quality that should carry the day. Having just finished, and adored, Stephen Mitchell's translation, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Now that my toe is thoroughly dipped, when the time comes for The Odyssey, I'll probably go with a translation that's a bit 'tougher'. I'm willing to let myself get there one toe at a time, though, know what I mean?
I'll have my proper review of The Iliad up in (hopefully) another day or two. In the meantime, here's the short version: it was great!
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
books to go: 84
So a pretty amazing thing has happened.
At work, we have a huge number of very loyal customers, who come in all the time and buy fuck-loads of books. It's great, because we get to know them and we can chat to them about what we're reading and what they're reading. It's like a closed loop of nerdy-jabbering-about-books, until eventually every staff member knows everything there is to know about every book that ever existed (in theory --- in practice, we're still working on it).
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, one of our best customers was moaning about how many books she owns that she's never read. Take her moaning with a pinch of salt, because after all, she was in a friggin' bookstore at the the time. I wasn't there, but one of my esteemed colleagues took the opportunity to tell our moaning customer about this little project of mine: only buy one book for every ten you read, and eventually you'll be able to look at your library and say 'I have defeated you, mwahahahaha' ... and if, after that, you put on a glove made of metal and stroke a malicious-looking cat while plotting world domination, surely nobody could begrudge you.
Once she'd heard about it (the read-ten/buy-one part, not the metal-glove/kill-everybody part), the customer loved the idea. And she's decided to do exactly the same thing herself.
Yep, I have a follower. An acolyte. A disciple.
I'm just like Jesus.
Don't tell my boss, though, because I don't think he'd be too happy to know that our customers are following my example and buying less books. If this catches on, I could single-handedly put us out of business! I guess if I get fired, I'll have more time to read ...
Cheers, JC
currently reading: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
books to go: 122
Uh, hi, I guess.
My name's John and I work in a bookstore and, probably unsurprisingly, I covet books. A lot. And when you work in a bookstore and have very little willpower, you're able to acquire books at a phenomenal rate. Here's how it normally goes: 'Hmm, that looks interesting. And so does that. And so do those eight other hefty novels. And hey, I've carried them all up to the registers. And now my wallet's in my hand, how did that happen? And, wait, oh God, I've done it again. Looks like it's Doritos for dinner for the rest of the week.'
But the thing that really killed me was the free books. Because publishers want us to read their wares so we can talk them up to our customers, we can ask them for free copies of stuff we want to read. And get them. It's like magic or something.
And then as if that isn't enough, Penguin, the biggest book distributor in the country, has a policy that if anything arrives at our store damaged, we don't have to send it back. We can't sell it. We don't have to send it back. You do the maths on that one. And it's not just any publisher, it's bloody Penguin. Penguin with all their wonderful, terrible classics. Those ones with the black jackets, they're flimsy as hell so they can sell them so damn cheap and it sure doesn't take much to knock them out of shape. 'Samuel Richardson's Clarissa? I guess I might read it someday ...' And home it goes.
Until one fateful day I decided to count the number of unread books that I owned, and was flabbergasted by the total. I actually had to have a bit of a sit down. And so I made a pledge, a foolhardy, quixotic, anal-retentive pledge: I WOULD READ EVERY BOOK THAT I OWN! (My description of the pledge could equally be a description of me, now that I think about it. Throw in 'shy' and 'goofy-looking' and 'immature' and that's pretty much me.)
Now, the idea of going cold turkey on new books was terrifying, and as single-minded as I can be about some things, I thought there'd be no way I could stick to that. So I came up with a plan that would still allow me to buy books, just at a drastically reduced rate: I'm allowed to get a new book for every ten old books that I read. Or, to put it more simply: Read Ten, Buy One.
And in case you're wondering about the title of the blog ... my Mum, who's lovely, but also kind of a sadist, gave me the entire six-volume, 5000-page sequence of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' - an epic novel of one guy's kinda boring life. I know there's no way I'll ever read it if there's anything (and I do mean anything) else in the house. When I have one thing left to read, it'll be Proust.
So, here are the basic rules:
I can only read books that I already own.
I can only acquire (be it bought, given, stolen, found on the street, or written myself) one new book for every ten old books that I've read.
When I acquire a new book, I must read it straight away.
(I should add that I reserve the right to break these rules as I see fit. If an author I really love has a new book out, or the film's just about to come out and I want to read it first, or if it turns out I'm as spineless as a Portuguese Man-of-War. And I've already committed the biggest cheat of all: I'm not including my copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy.)
So that's my quest. I've been going for about six months or so and making steady progress. The soccer World Cup was a boon. I took time off for it and managed to use the boring games (I'm looking at you, Switzerland) to get through a couple of hefty buggers that I'd been worrying might take me a couple of months each (I'm looking at you The Crimson Petal and the White).
I'll be blogging about the books I'm reading, about what's still to come on my shelves (I've got them all mapped out on an Excel spreadsheet), and I'll be soliciting opinions on what I should buy when I'm up to my tenth old book and starting to get excited. Me being me, I'll also be blogging about writing and films, and anything else that takes my fancy really.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
books to go: 125
