What I’m reading now.
■ Since my last post, I have read a number of graphic fiction works, including:
● Grass Kings, Volume 1: New World Order (Matt Kindt; 2018. Graphic fiction.)
● Dept. H, Vol. 2: After the Flood (Matt Kindt; 2017. Graphic fiction.)
● Dept. H, Vol. 3: Decompressed (Matt Kindt; 2018. Graphic fiction.)
● Beverly (Nick Drnaso; 2016. Graphic fiction.)
While waiting for the library to acquire Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (which appeared on the Mann Booker Prize longlist), I borrowed his 2016 work, Beverly, which was alternately damning and depressing. I am also waiting for the library to acquire the fourth volume of Matt Kindt’s Dept. H.
■ I am behind on my Banned Books Week selection, a reread of The Awakening (Kate Chopin), but I have finished The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s meditation on death, grief, falling apart, and staggering on. For the commonplace book:
p. 80
Her husband believed that once the theater went dark and the film began, the viewer was alone — even if they had arrived in the company of others. This solitude was needed to dissolve the logic and laws of the world they had come from, replacing those principles with the logic and laws of the screen; that was how Yuriel Mata’s eels had slipped past. In this way you could descend into the theater with a person you knew intimately and then, once the lights returned, find yourself seated next to a stranger.
p. 88
Her own vast and incurious country often felt alien to her, with its unimaginative pledges and toxic patriotism, its aversion to discomfort and complex thought (the death of her brother-in-law alone had been enough to instill in her a hatred of truisms — what was so impossible about saying, Right now our lives are fucked up and we don’t know exactly when things will get better?), its desire to be recognized as a beacon of justice without ever actually acting like one. At the same time, America was the only country she had ever lived in, and she understood it could be disingenuous, perhaps even dangerous, to allow herself to feel superior to the thing she had always lived inside, the thing that had made her.
p. 93
You are dead, she thought. How could she have forgotten?
She had heard of the syndrome that drove people to believe loved ones had been replaced by fakes, but perhaps an inversion existed, one in which the fake was mistaken for the real, and she was afflicted.
p. 174
She did not know how to grieve her husband’s death or her father’s decline or the choice each day carried her closer to, the choice she was wholly unprepared to make — or would turn out to be more prepared than any person should be.
She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.
Bullshit, Richard said. No one gets on a plane to see a movie.
Everyone dies at the end, she said, except the hero’s daughter.
p. 200
When a person did not know they were being watched, what they would do when they believed themselves to be in a state of true privacy — that was the lure of of found footage, that clarification of the human mystery, and that was why surveillance was so lethal: a true erosion of self.
■ With only three months remaining, it seems prudent to re-evaluate my reading resolutions for this year.
1. Read from the shelves.
I must make this annual resolution simply to torment myself. Of the 111 books I have read cover to cover this year, 39 were published in 2018. So much for reading from my own library, eh?
2. Complete a close reading of Moby Dick.
I’ve read it once and listened to the spectacular audiobook (William Hootkins; 2004) dozens of times, but I would still like to reread Moby Dick.
3. Reread at least one Vonnegut novel.
Sirens of Titan by Thanksgiving break.
4. Finish reading several books abandoned in 2017 (or *gulp* earlier).
No progress.
5. Read at least thirty non-fiction titles.
I’ve read twenty-three, so far.
Nerdishly 