The Book Tower

My posts are becoming increasingly serious lately so a meme to lighten things up. From Booking Through Thursday. Reading in public, do you do it?

Oh yes. It’s very rare for me to go out without a book in my bag or in my pocket and I find it very easy to concentrate and read in a public place. I could probably settle down to a few chapters in a football stadium. On a recent visit to Sea World in Florida, when the heaving crowds were approaching football stadium levels, I sat in the shade with my book and let them all barge by. My family have got used to me.

If I’m going out for the day and I’ve less than 100 pages to read in my current book, I’ll take the next book I’m planning to read with me as well. Is this eccentric behaviour? If I’m out for the day without a book and at a loose end, maybe with an hour to spare, I’ll buy a book to read if I’m able to. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or supposed to be doing. As the parent of an eight year old I can easily concentrate on a book with hoards of children buzzing round me, a skill I perfected recently after spending a day in the Children’s Museum in Chicago.

I can read in parks, on buses, planes and trains, standing up in bars and sitting down in restaurants. Being married to a smoker, this is handy as smokers are now obliged to vanish, either on their own or with other smokers, for periodic ten minute breaks. If it wasn’t for my book, I would be horribly alone. I have even been tempted to read in the theatre, after being dragged to a show I desperately didn’t want to see, but held back not wanting to offend the people I was with. For similar reasons I lay off reading during a wedding ceremony, and the speeches that followed.

I don’t think there’s anything odd about reading in public. It’s a combination of shutting out the rest of the world, not giving two hoots as to what other people might think of you, and remembering to take your book in the first place. Being married to a shopaholic, I’ve never yet been refused in department stores when I’ve asked for a stool so I can at least sit down and read in some comfort. Why just stand there and look bored?

Comments [9]

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Don’t give up on The Road. It’s a bleak, depressing and harrowing book, but it’s still a remarkable work of fiction that deserves the praise it’s received so far, and deserves to be read to the end.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel is set in a post apocalyptic world where the human race is facing extinction. Cities are burnt and abandoned, a sooty ash covers the cold and dying landscape, food and resources are scarce. Amongst this devestation an unnamed man and his young son struggle on, following an endless road in a vague hope that they will find safety, life and the fabled “good guys”. They search and scavenge; for food, tools and shelter and the story falls into a repetitive rhythm as McCarthy describes their endless tasks – filling their cart of belongings, gathering wood for fires, seeking out new hiding places, looking always for useful things. One of the most effective parts of the book is when the man finds a rare object of beauty, an antique sextant from an abandoned ship. After admiring it he simply discards it, an object useless to him in a life only in need of useful things.

The Road isn’t a science fiction novel. We don’t find out what has happened to cause this catastrophe; it’s likely that there’s been a nuclear holocaust – but the conceit of this novel is that we must just accept what has happened. It isn’t a horror novel either, although it contains some of the most horrible scenes I’ve read for a long time. If I had to categorise this book I’d probably fail. It isn’t attempting prophecy; at the most it’s a warning of how easily humanity can slide into terrible depths, those of self-destruction, murder and cannibalism.

What makes this novel work is the father and son relationship. As a parent I found this convincing and very moving; I couldn’t stop whispering to myself “yes, yes, yes” as I read on. Their relationship is just spot on – the father’s protection of his son at all costs, the boy’s endless questioning and need for reassurance, his scepticism and how they deal with the ever present danger engulfing them. The Road asks uncomfortable questions of the reader. How far would you go to protect someone? Would you be prepared to kill or be killed? Because the bond between father and son was so believable I found myself able to consider such questions.

Unhappy reading at times, at others almost unbearable, but I was compelled to read on. I’m not giving away any spoilers here, but if you leave the book unfinished it will be a far bleaker experience for you than if you finish it. Don’t give up on The Road.

Comments [9]

Maybe it’s because I haven’t left it long enough since finishing The Book Thief, but I found Everything Is Illuminating difficult reading. Difficult in it’s subject matter of the Holocaust rather that Jonathan Safran Foer’s experimental shifts in writing style; although at times I did find the book often trying too hard to impress. On the whole the novel is a great achievement. Foer wrote Everything Is Illuminated when he was in his early twenties, which is part of the reason I’ve put it off for so long. How can such a youngster write so deeply? Okay, how can he be so illuminating? Maybe I’m just prejudiced as an oldie.

Everything Is Illuminated is at times hilarious, such as the account of the journey that the Foer character, his interpreter, his interpreter’s grandfather and a flatulent dog called Sammy Davis Junior Junior embark upon. At other times it’s heartbreaking; the Holocaust flashbacks, and what eventually happens to the characters that we grow fond of. I loved it, but I was also infuriated by it. At times I hated it. I lapped it up and despaired of it it turn. I embraced its insight and then I didn’t understand it. I found it a breeze and then I found it unbearable. I couldn’t put it down and then I didn’t want to pick it up. Flaws in me rather than the book, perhaps. Who am I to say?

Everything Is Illuminated is one of those books I find I am unable to review, possibly because it demands rereading before fully understanding. I can only make a small suggestion. Form a book group. Recruit as many people as you can, all creeds, all ages. Read this book. I found that Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood was the same for me in that I couldn’t review it, and I am soon to start on McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, another possibly disturbing novel I’ve heard great things about.

Before that, however, I’m having a go at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ve guessed it. The novel is bleak and disturbing, but gripping nevertheless. And I’m reading Philip Roth’s Everyman after that. But whoever said things were going to be easy?

The Bleak Book Group. Apply here…

Comments [2]