A Time To Read

My schedule has changed and I find myself with more free time than I've had in recent memory. Having spent the last 15 years of my life without a television, I cannot seem to work up an interest in my new roommate's favorite programs so I tried turning my attention to books. I can't remember the last time I was able to keep up with contemporary fiction and I was excited to settle in to some stories that I've heard so much about lately.

At the airport bookstore I picked up two recent Pulitzer Prize winners- The Road and Middlesex- and the bestseller The Lovely Bones (the store had a buy 2, get 1 free sale going on at the time). I was utterly mystified. While Middlesex was at least entertaining, the other two were so bad that I could hardly get through them, I found myself skimming over long sections of prose, just to get the pain of reading over more quickly.

The Road was a typical dystopian post-apocalypse scenario with the catch here being- wait for it-- they don't specifically say that the conditions were caused by a nuclear explosion. Thus, we don't know for certain what caused the current situation- WWIII? A virulent disease? Space aliens? Do we care? Not really. Oh, and also, he doesn't use quotation marks. If you've seen Mad Max, you can guess not only the major plot elements but also probably a few of the more important scenes.

The Lovely Bones, while marketed as adult literature, is actually a novel written for teenaged girls. Complete with boys and acne and a parental divorce. Yes, the main character is dead, but once you get over that conceit the book is full of mawkish characters and tedious episodes of suburban life.

Is this the kind of tripe people want to read? At least Middlesex contains complicated characters and intricate plot twists. Personally, I thought the book dragged a bit in the last third, but perhaps I was just still reeling from the two previous episodes of literary bludgeoning that I'd just experienced.

Thankfully, I also came upon The Solitudes, by John Crowley. This is a re-release of a novel that was originally published in 1987 as the first of a four part cycle called Aegypt. This is not the first work by Crowley that I've read- his novel Little, Big is one of my favorites, and his collection of short novels called Otherwise has some real gems- but it does not disappoint. Crowley is a sci-fi fantasy writer- Little, Big won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for best novel- which is not a genre that I usually enjoy. Still, it's not the fantastic that draws me to him, but the purity of his writing. His novels are dense with history and I seem to spend an equal amount of time with Wikipedia as I do with the book itself. Little, Big takes place in present day upstate New York, but the 12th century German King Barbarossa plays a major role. Here in the solitudes we follow the young professor Pierce Moffet through the tumultuous 70's. Woven throughout this modern tale is the story of the 15th century featuring mathematician/astrologer John Dee, Italian monk and martyr Geordano Bruno, and a young struggling actor named Will Shakespeare.

Check out this exerpt. The character was unexpectedly waylaid (due to a mechanical failure on a greyhound bus) on a trip from NYC to a small college in upstate New York. He ended up spending the night in a small town, missing an interview but starting something more important:

"He would think of it often, in different ways and in different contexts; he had already begun to think of it in the frigid airless bus passing away. And- on city streets, still violent with summer, foul with loathsome summer; in his tower apartment, grown too large now as the suit of a wasted strveling; or when steeling himself for the task he now knew lay ahead- he would sometimes feel those scenes he had visted lying just behind him, a pool of golden light, so close that he was uncertain just how he had traveled from there to here: to here where he supposed he must now be for good, or as nearly for good as made no difference.

Unfortunately, The Solitudes is not really a stand-alone novel but truly the introduction of the series. Fortunately, the following three books are available, the final fourth novel having only been published in 2007. Unfortunately, I hear the rest of the story does not maintain the high standards set by this one. I'm betting they're better than The Lovely Bones, though.