Reading this month:

My Movie Business
John Irving

A post-script to The Cider House Rules, for my purposes, though he writes about a few of his other books in translation to film as well. I just like John Irving a lot. I don't think I write like he does, and I don't even like the same authors (Dickens, et al) that he does. Most writers who labor over detail try my patience, but Irving's worlds are so perfectly constructed that I never think to question why this or that has to be present. Among great writers, I think, there are some who seem to have received their one or two (rarely more) masterpieces fully-formed straight from either God or outer space (Kesey), and there are others who give you the impression that you are reading them talking to you (Vonnegut), and some - like Irving - who just seem to know everything that's worth knowing about the craft of writing, and they get on with it. They rely not on divine inspiration but on working really hard and being determined to get it done well - and, in that sense, the act of writing seems like something very nice they are doing for you as much as the creation of, you know, art. The best thing about his books, for me, is feeling assured at the beginning that the story will not to go off the rails, get lazy, wander off in whimsy or take the easy way out. Characters will be true to themselves throughout; the rules will be followed and, when the necessary time comes, neatly broken.

Anyway, this book itself is fairly minor - it's double-spaced, for one thing, and a real John Irving book is never double-spaced. He writes about his sources for The Cider House Rules and, in a gentle version of William Goldman's style, his experiences with the film adaptations of his books. Interesting if you're a fan, but not a stand-alone sort of book.

The Cider House Rules
John Irving

I have read three John Irving books other than this one, and since I read each of them on a vacation, I held off reading "The Cider House Rules" until another vacation came along. It seemed like the sort of pattern that ought to be respected. ("The Imaginary Girlfriend", his very brief memoir, was the third; I read it on the first day that I tried to work after college, when the temp agency sent me to an office two hours away from where I was living at the time. I gave up an hour into the trip, late and depressed about the prospect of work, and I decided instead to install myself in a cafe, call the agency a few times and claim that I was lost until they lost interest. They seemed to feel bad for getting me lost, and there were no hard feelings.) I have grown weary of dodging plot details from the movie, though, and I figure that the holiday spirit and new employment pays suitable respect to the pattern.

The Compleat Chaucer: Now Revised For Additional Ye-Olde-ness
Geoffrey Chaucer

Still not quite ye-olde enough for my scholarly tastes. Has no one a real commitment to ye-oldness any more? Fuckers.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Douglas Adams

I tore right through almost everything Douglas Adams wrote in rapid sequence during my early teens. This one, for some reason, escaped my attention. I am tearing through it now, loving every moment. There's really no higher endorsement I can give it than to say it's Douglas Adams on top form:

In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear catastrophic structural exasperation", or to put it another way - as a junior cabinet member did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt him for the rest of his career - the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was."

Portnoy's Complaint
Phillip Roth

A virtuoso performance by the writer as anything else - the book is a breathless rant by the narrator, spanning the entire 270 pages. Ah, late twentieth-century Jews who have fallen away from religion and are mired in complex sexual neuroses and their mothers. Will they never learn? It's a pretty good book, but I felt uncomfortable reading it on the train. I suspect that everyone is reading over my shoulder, especially beautiful women, who think I am reading porn and are crossing me off their list. Wait! Let me explain the context! Ah, nuts.

The Haymarket Tragedy
Paul Avrich

(See 010606 about the Haymarket affair itself.) I've read a few short histories of the incident, but this is the thousand pound gorilla on the topic. Teen years reading (and re-reading) Kurt Vonnegut set me up with a permanent interest in fiercely populist labor history 1880-1930, and the Twain I read previously put me in the mood to read about that era. This is a great book, cleanly written and impeccably researched. Anarchism, far from the tepid rebellion-for-dummies of today, was really interesting in its prime as a philosophy and movement.

The Bible According to Mark Twain: Irreverent Writings on Eden, Heaven and the Flood
Mark Twain

Although this is a 160 pg book masquerading as a 360 pg one, it's still a nifty collection. The essays are drawn from several decades of Twain's life, but all of them share the idea of critically examining the Bible (if Adam and Eve had no concept of good and evil prior to eating the apple, how could they be punished for doing wrong, since they had no idea what wrong was?) and (particularly excellent) commonly-held notions about life in Heaven. All of essays tear the roof off the joint, as it were. Nice. The length is padded to absurd extremes by the imbecilic editors with fragments and other scraps that, while promising, don't really work out of their never-written context; and the editors include gobs and gobs of lunk-headed notes, some rather intrusive, including introductions to every piece that blithely give away many the major jokes. Avoid the intros, but if you've ever wanted to read some Twain other than the standards, this is good stuff.