What I am Reading

As usual, I'm reading multiple books at once, if not simultaneously. There's the Travel Book, the Primary Book, the Short Story collection, the Long-Term Difficult Book. These are important, critical catagories. You wouldn't want to caught with one source of intellectual stimuli, right?

-Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I have not gotten too far into this, but that's not really necessary when it comes to Le Guin. You know it's going to be elegant as all hell. In this case, she's writing a sequel to or prequel or remix of Vergil's The Aeneid, but from the POV of Lavinia, who got nary a line in the original. So far, it's a relaxed piece, but as Le Guin is depicting the maturation of a young princess it'd be a surprise to come across much in terms of swordplay, dragon slaying, or bosom heaving. Instead, there's emotional insight, much of which comments on gender parity or its lack. The prose is efficient, elegant, and evocative. So far: an excellent book.

-dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. 

At the fifty percent mark, I'm thinking that the rumors of dhalgren's impenetrability as a text have been greatly exaggerated. It helps that I have read the majority of Delany's novels prior to tackling dhalgren. I have a familiarity with his style and the necessitites to unpacking it. So, yes--if you started dhalgren on an odd whim, frustration seems like an understandable consequence considering the dense beginning and the surreal or subjective moments that grace the narrative, casting doubt on the reality of the minimal plot.

Indeed, it is an elusive and elliptical text, more so than any of the other works of Delany's that I've read, but the actual happenings of the story--the majority, anyway--are grounded in the quotidian details that Delany deploys so precisely and perfectly. He is not really working to dazzle (jazzercize?) your cognitive facilities as Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow. Which is not to say the novel is an easy read, but Delany seems to approach complex thematic material often from the angle of ostensibly simple, and occasionally jagged, prose, which makes his work more accessible although not necessarily any easier to master.

Odd that I have not actually touched on the book's contents. Also, it's quite possible that the novel will (as Jonathan Lethem blurbs on the cover) 'swallow [me] alive,' [me] in this case being an 'astonished reader.'

I would indeed be astonished if a book swallowed me alive.

-Adam Robots by Adam Roberts

I am also reading the new short story collection by Adam Roberts, a man of growing internet infamy, it seems, at least in science fiction circles. There is a lot of talk about him, like, what's up with that guy? and How come he's always Adam Roberts-ing it all over the place?

The stories are perfectly Adam Roberts stories, which means that they're funny, smart, prickly and subversive in ways that are not comforting to those seeking a steaming bowl of comforting genre fare.