The Third Quarterly Book Battle

A bit late due to various factors (having to finish 1Q84, writing my own novel, getting married, being tired) here is the third battle in my quest to find the best book to grace my eyes in 2012, encompassing all that I read between July and September. Previously, the grand final has been reached by Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in the first battle, and Stephen King's The Long Walk in the second.

In the third quarter of 2012, I read the following books: The Big Sleep, Love in the Time of Cholera, Oblivion, Boxer Beetle, and 1Q84. Let battle commence!

It's a thin field this quarter, partly due to the grotesque obesity of 1Q84 greedily hogging my reading time. The personified 1Q84 of my imagination lumbers around the arena with its guts spilling over the nappy that is its only clothing, slow and confused, yet showing flashes of pugilistic brilliance, much like a young Audley Harrison. Its wild attacks luckily catch Love in the Time of Cholera in the chops as it's delivering a 200-page soliloquy on love and knock it to the floor, at which 1Q84 tires and drops arse first onto Cholera's face, suffocating it. I was really disappointed with Love in the Time of Cholera after expecting great things from it and hearing so much about the author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I expected a Latin American magical realism tour de force, but all I got was turgid and overlong musings. I found it an absolute chore to get through. And now it's dead. 1Q84 staggers to its feet, but seduced at the prospect of food to gorge and sustain its spiraling word count, it picks up a beetle casually dropped by Boxer Beetle, only to find that it's a super strength hardcore Nazi beetle, that sticks in its throat and eats it alive from the inside. 1Q84 was another book that I found disappointing: some of it is very good, and through the first two books I enjoyed it and looked forward to finding out what would happen, but the third book seems an unnecessary addition to the tale, and feels as if Murakami was bowing to pressure to continue the story rather than writing it to find out himself what happened. The story is caught between fantasy and realism, neither one nor the other, and not enough of either to be truly satisfying. I still liked it, but when you've read a book as good as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a few months before, anything will struggle to match that masterpiece. Boxer Beetle stands over the corpse and malevolently chuckles, and is still grinning as it collapses to the floor, a bullet hole showing daylight through to a smoking gun held by The Big Sleep. Boxer Beetle, the interesting debut by Ned Beauman, I picked up on a whim after finding out that he's around my age and wanting to see how he writes, and I wasn't disappointed. Unfortunately, the competition here is just too strong for it, but I think in the future Beauman may write some truly great novels.

That leaves us with two books duking it out for the heavyweight title: Raymond Chandler's detective noir The Big Sleep, and David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion. It's tough to choose between them. Wallace's stories showed me a way of writing that I didn't know was possible, treating words like water and trickling them onto the page in wonderful mixed up ways, and infusing the beauty of his story-telling with a dry scientific style that when I write about I always think sounds terrible but knocks me down with majesty when I read him. The first story in Oblivion, Mister Squishy, about a focus group studying a cake, is one of the best fifty pages I've ever read. The Big Sleep, meanwhile, provides a blueprint for every great crime novel of the post-war era, and displays an understated greatness in the writing as its protagonist stumbles from clue to clue to solve a mystery. Just writing this, I've changed my mind four times about which book should win, and as the two foes stand in the centre of the ring trading blow for blow I still can't work it out. Eventually, (after leaving this post for half an hour and coming back to find them still barely raising their skinned and bloodied fists, their legs turned to jelly, their pages crinkled and print running with sweat) Oblivion launches one last fevered assault of perspicacity and The Big Sleep falls into a heap on the floor, pulped.

The best book I read between July and September is: Oblivion. Hip hip hooray!

Steppenwolf: the Book from the Future

I tried to read Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf once before. I didn't get too far, only to page 69, before I gave up, flummoxed at the total lack of sense I could derive from it. That was a few years ago, and last month I went back to it, determined to make it through and finish this time. I did, but I'm not sure if I understood it any more than I did the first time. The big difference was that this time, rather than casting it aside and moving onto something else, I loved it.

The story is mostly an insane mess, stuffed full of ideas, and even reading it now it seems as if it would be ahead of its time if it was published today, so god knows what people thought when it came out in 1927. It's a wild mix of philosophy, post-war guilt, mental disintegration, and bourgeois-baiting brilliance. But other than those buzz words,  it's only now that I'm coming to write about it that I realise Steppenwolf has again tricked me into remembering or understanding barely anything about it. I can't even put my finger on what I liked about it other than the imagination. It's the kind of book that you could give a hundred different people to read, and when they finish they'd think it was about a hundred different things. Or like a poem, one you have to read dozens of times to uncover what single lines are trying to say. Hesse always said that it was misinterpreted but never took the time to fully explain what it was about, so it seems the book's secrets may be locked away forever. I don't get it, but I like it.

I've Written A Whole Book

November has come and gone and inside that time I managed to beat NaNoWriMo and write an entire 50,000 word novel! I wrote nearly every day in the month, and learnt that I don't have to worry anymore about wanting to be a writer but not doing much about it, because I'm not terminally lazy, I can do it. Now I've got 50,000 unedited words that I'm sure are mostly drivel, and I'm looking forward to sitting down and banging them into some order. Unfortunately, I had to have an operation under general anesthetic last week and it's knocked the hell out of me, so I haven't started yet. Stitches come out tomorrow though and I'm hoping I'll feel better after that, so soon I'll be able to embark on the second and much more time-consuming stage of NaNoWriMo: turning a load of words into a book that makes sense.