Thursday, December 29, 2005
Prose and Kongs
I've been reading books. Let's see if I have anything intelligent to say about them.
+ Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. His first novel, channeling Orwell. The storytelling skills - that page-turning fuel - are there, but the stylistic voice of the mature "so it goes" Vonnegut I love so much is absent. The guy who much later claimed that the secret to good writing is don't use semicolons! is the same guy who wrote this book? (But I really do like it so far.)
+ The Inner Circle, T. C. Boyle's novel about Alfred Kinsey's sex research. I tried hard to like this book. It's just, nothing happens. There's no clear conflict, no real solid characters, no ending (is that a spoiler?); the book is just an elaborate fractal of parenthetical comments. It could have been titled "SEX: Now That I Have Your Attention..." I don't want to call Boyle unscrupulous - the book isn't really pornographic or anything - but I'm sure there was a reason he chose Alfred Kinsey as a subject instead of Jonas Salk or somebody.
+ Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, Alan Alda's recent memoir. Ha ha! I got it for Christmas. I haven't started it yet, but I can't wait. It's autographed!
+ The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. It weighs 22.5 pounds. I've read about 8.9 pounds of it so far, and I'm loving it! Bill Watterson's extremely revealing introduction to the book made me very happy. As well as showing us some cool stuff (one of his Cincinatti Post political cartoons, early C+H submission samples, cartoons from high school and college, a 1995 oil painting of a New Mexico landscape, and other droolables), I believe he's beginning to shed some of the mystique he's created about himself as an untouchable comic strip deity, the crusty 'no-one-understands-me' essayist of the Tenth Anniversary Book. Watterson now comes across more as a regular guy, recalling his disasterous career in the early 80s ineptly and unwillingly doing editorial cartoons (a situation I also seem to have stumbled into), hinting at being "pathologically antisocial" and admitting that he didn't start off thinking that cartooning was art. Perhaps this will keep some of those Chagrin Falls stalkers at bay.
Book club is now adjourned.
+ Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. His first novel, channeling Orwell. The storytelling skills - that page-turning fuel - are there, but the stylistic voice of the mature "so it goes" Vonnegut I love so much is absent. The guy who much later claimed that the secret to good writing is don't use semicolons! is the same guy who wrote this book? (But I really do like it so far.)
+ The Inner Circle, T. C. Boyle's novel about Alfred Kinsey's sex research. I tried hard to like this book. It's just, nothing happens. There's no clear conflict, no real solid characters, no ending (is that a spoiler?); the book is just an elaborate fractal of parenthetical comments. It could have been titled "SEX: Now That I Have Your Attention..." I don't want to call Boyle unscrupulous - the book isn't really pornographic or anything - but I'm sure there was a reason he chose Alfred Kinsey as a subject instead of Jonas Salk or somebody.
+ Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, Alan Alda's recent memoir. Ha ha! I got it for Christmas. I haven't started it yet, but I can't wait. It's autographed!
+ The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. It weighs 22.5 pounds. I've read about 8.9 pounds of it so far, and I'm loving it! Bill Watterson's extremely revealing introduction to the book made me very happy. As well as showing us some cool stuff (one of his Cincinatti Post political cartoons, early C+H submission samples, cartoons from high school and college, a 1995 oil painting of a New Mexico landscape, and other droolables), I believe he's beginning to shed some of the mystique he's created about himself as an untouchable comic strip deity, the crusty 'no-one-understands-me' essayist of the Tenth Anniversary Book. Watterson now comes across more as a regular guy, recalling his disasterous career in the early 80s ineptly and unwillingly doing editorial cartoons (a situation I also seem to have stumbled into), hinting at being "pathologically antisocial" and admitting that he didn't start off thinking that cartooning was art. Perhaps this will keep some of those Chagrin Falls stalkers at bay.
Book club is now adjourned.
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I've been curious indeed about The Complete C&H. Unsure whether it'd be worth buying, as I already have all the individual books (save the last fifteen pages of Revenge of the Baby-Sat, in circumstances forgotten in the fog of pre-teenhood), but curious... Does he include much commentary on individual strips?
None at all. We only hear from him in his 13-page introduction. Only get it if you're a gonzo fan or a totally out-of-control consumer (or both, as in my case).
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