And we shall have peace

Book: Siddhartha

Author: Herman Hesse

Published: 1951 (New Direction)

Pages: 152

Q: How do you find happiness?

A: Live simply.

That’s it. Maybe you could listen to the river – that really helps. So does being a shallow materialistic rich guy for a couple decades so you can remember what that’s like and appreciate how much better the simple stuff makes you feel.

That worked for Siddhartha, son of an Eastern holy man who rejected all teachings because he found words meant nothing so therefore all teachings meant nothing and what he felt meant everything. He goes off to join a religious order, then falls into materialism when he goes off by himself, and finally finds peace helping an old man paddle a raft across a river because that puts him in touch with the earth. That’s where he finds true happiness.

It’s a fable, told with very pointed dialogue and formal language structure and time that melts away in a sentence. I knew this, and I put off reading this because of it, and that was a dumb reason. A less dumb reason was I didn’t want to find out that you have to be still and calm and give up yourself to find yourself. I don’t want to start agreeing with that and am being completely 100% serious when I say that my nervous tics and preoccupations make me feel human. I want my meaning of life to be as loud as possible.

But that turned out to be another dumb worry too. Siddhartha’s ultimate peace is based on, and I’m paraphrasing here, noticing how awesome everything is and being super-psyched about it and using it to enjoy life without unnecessary superficial crap that secretly or not-so drags us down.

And he’s totally human, guys. Like, when he meets his young son and takes him in after his mother dies, the son acts like a total brat and eventually runs off and Siddhartha goes after him but then the raft dude says, “That’s how you started to find your way, right? Leaving your dad’s?” It hurts like a bastard, but Siddhartha recognizes the truth of that and lets him go.

None of it’s easy but it’s all worth it in the end. I really like that message.

Note on copy of book: I’ve no idea where this one came from. It looks exactly like the type my high school AP English teacher had in a set on her bookcase as one of the extra books we could choose from to do some sort of project about, and a fellow APer said Siddhartha was really good, so it’s possible… but my boyfriend, double English and Philosophy graduate that he is (also Library Science, y’all! He had me at “So, I’m a librarian.”), also said that. Possibly I bought it cheap and used after talking about it with him. I DON’T KNOW, and that sort of bothers me. But not enough to keep it off my bookshelf. 

The ABCs of LARP

Book: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

Author: Ethan Gilsdorf

Published: 2009 (Lyons Press)

Pages: 293

If you can tell me what LARP means and use it in a sentence that describes why the participants get angry when you call their events Renaissance Fairs, then you have graduated from this book before opening its pages. Don’t worry about reading it.

As for the rest of you – who the hell are you and how did you find this blog?!

I kid. But not by much. I’ve only gotten geekier since high school, so none of this surface-level dive into role-playing games, fantasy literature, Lord of the Rings tourism, and Dragon*Con was any sort of news whatsoever. If you’ve ever wondered about any of this stuff but neither you nor any of your friends are into it, eh, this would be a good very basic starting point so you can go into your local comic book shop and know how to tell them to teach you more.

I don’t really like the writing style. Gilsdorf circles around the same points (Fantasy lets people escape their boring/stressful/terrible real lives! Role-playing and tabletop games are actually good socializing! Geekery is something you grow out of except when you don’t!) over and over even when his chapter title indicated he had moved on to something else.

And oh my god he dropped the Styrofoam mace SO HARD when it game to the Geeks in Love chapter. Seriously, it was about half a page of “Here is this couple who both like nerdy things [she likes fantasy and he likes sci fi] and their shared house reflects that” before he goes back to wondering why people love disappearing into fantasy so much and never mentions the, you know, actual LOVE STORY of the two people who were geekily in love. That would’ve been SO COOL to hear about. Maybe I’m biased but geeky love stories are the BEST, y’all. They’re about smart people connecting and coupling over complex things, and –

But we don’t get any of that.

He does distinguish between fantasy and sci fi; although he doesn’t talk about the latter too much and the future will always have much more of my heart than the past, it was refreshing to acknowledge the real differences and not just do the thing that every retail bookstore does and smushing them together.

He fails at the personal connection thing, though. His D&D younger days keep coming up, in valid exploration of how he used that to feel powerful in the wake of his mother’s incurable brain aneurism, but then he can never decide if he should outgrow it or the Lord of the Rings obsession that he uses as an excuse to explore New Zealand. His girlfriend kind of wants him to grow up, but maybe that’s not all she wants, he doesn’t really know, so they stay together but not happily and it’s all Frodo’s fault? I guess? He’s not clear about that at all and it pops up randomly and awkwardly. Much like those adverbs.

It’s weirdly condescending for a self-proclaimed one of the tribe, and he always sounds so self-conscious and like he’s trying to find a genuine reason to laugh at all this and dismiss it as ridiculous. BUT THE GEEKERY IS TOO STRONG and it’s getting too mainstream to call any of this weird anymore.

Ahem. It mostly made me want to go to Dragon*Con so I could write better than he did about that experience. I COULD MEET DARTH VADER, Y’ALL.

Gothic daddy issues

Book: Heart-Shaped Box

Author: Joe Hill

Published: 2007 (Harper)

Pages: 351

If we’re going on Fiction as a Psyche-Revealer (and it totally is), Joe Hill has daddy issues.

Let’s get the probably-haunted elephant out of the way by mentioning that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son and writes on the same sort of subjects/themes – more mention of that really soon, I promise. But right now I just want to tell you that none of the father figures in this book are short of psychologically deranged.

Okay. So, Jude’s an aging rock star who buys a dead man’s suit and ends up getting himself and his latest girlfriend haunted until they travel back to the lady who sold them the suit, then back to Jude’s long-fled home in Louisiana, chased the whole time by the stepfather of the girl Jude dated before his current girl.

SPOILER PARAGRAPH: It was the stepfather’s suit, and it looks like at first the former girl committed suicide after Jude dumps her because she’s depressed, but really she was getting ready to write Jude about how the stepdad (a professional hypnotist) hypnotized her and did all sort of ooky abuse to her and her big sister knew and encouraged it and even offered her own daughter up for it. Jude and his current girl basically have to fumble their way into figuring out how to open a portal to the beyond so the abused girl could come back and pull her stepdad back for revenge and destruction in the underworld. END SPOILER PARAGRAPH. Pretty much.

Hill wastes no time getting to the action. Jude was being haunted by seriously page five, and once the stepdad ghost crept on the scene, he took no time at all to keep their lives at a screaming hell until they manage to beat him back like a week and a five-state road trip later. It’s quick but works; the characters flesh out on the move. I like how Jude called his girlfriends nicknames based on where they come from (Florida was the former, Georgia was the current), and I love that he has dogs he’s named after John Bonnom from Led Zeppelin and Angus what’s-his-name (AC/DC) and that the dogs are a big part of their protection but don’t turn into furry mcguffins. Also, I loved that burning the suit does jack shit.

The ending is tied up too neatly in that prologue of generic good quiet life, and none of the story had an extra touch of weird humanity that made me love it, but as mentioned on the AV Club of Hill’s comic series “Lock and Key,” he leaves you with at least one image that will make it a little difficult to go to sleep in a dark, empty, shadow-ridden apartment. This time it was the creepy old guy’s scribbled-out eyes.

Right now, I’m putting it on my bookshelf, but when I run out of room, it will be one to get weeded. 

Not quite Joan of Arc

Book: Joan Books I-III

Author/illustrator: Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Pages: 579 total

Published: originals in 1995-1996, English translations in 2000 (Comics One)

Joan of Arc’s story is excellent to read when you want to latch on to someone else’s higher purpose and also swords. Although it’s got all the same details, this is not Joan of Arc’s actual story in these three manga volumes, and I spent most of my reading time wondering why.

Emil is a lot like Joan, in that she comes from the same town and grew up with the same stepdad and dresses like a boy and goes in her stepdad’s place to advance the same cause – only this time it’s a more muddled conflict between the King and the Dauphine of France instead of just France vs. England, so not only does Emil have a finer point of ideology to hang her conviction on, she also has a harder time figuring out who’s on her side for the King.

I would’ve enjoyed this so much more if it had either been a straight history of Joan of Arc or Emil finishing Joan’s crusade through her own completely different story. Instead, both stories get watered down and smushed together into a half-assed reincarnation journey that was frustrating mostly because Emil knew exactly how Joan’s worked out but does the same thing anyway hoping for pretty much the same result only not quite so burn-y at the end. My favorite part was when the ghost/spirit of Joan calls this out and is all, “Why’d you come to Orleans, dumbass? I sent you on this mission to get it done, not get you killed like me!”

It’s still exciting and a quest for justice against a Dauphin sporting the worst ‘80s-villian bowl-cut/fringe combo this side of a Very Special Episode, with exacting political intrigue and battles and stuff. But then she gets sentenced to burn at the stake (gee, I wonder who could’ve helped her prevent that…), and right as they’re tying her up, the stake is struck by lightning and the dauphin sees an effigy of Joan (‘s ghost? Spirit?) burning, and that’s it. He gives in to Emil, surrenders his rebellion, waits for his dad to die before trying to be king again (according to the prologue).

The art is gorgeous watercolor with colors that can contrast so much better than I ever thought of water colors being able to, all contained within long, ominous inked outlines. But sometimes in quarter profiles a person will blatantly have only one eye – like, the other one wasn’t even sketched in shadow or anything – and the speech bubbles don’t look like they were changed to accommodate the English translations so that makes for odd deciphering once in awhile.

I read this series a LOT quicker than I thought I would, so I can bring them back to the anime club my boyfriend heads on Wednesday nights and put them back on his Free Manga!! cart for The Teenagers to discover and give a good home.   

Look at the autobiographical influences!

Book: Look at the Harlequins!

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Published: 1974 (McGraw Hill)

Pages: 253

The more I read of this, the more I wondered if Nabokov was just fucking with me. Is it his own memoir, is it a satirical memoir of a writer very much like him only exaggerated, is it a novel in the form of said exaggerated memoir, and if so, what’s the difference between those last two?

I still don’t really have an answer seeing as how the book is called “a new novel by the author of…” on its book jacket, offers all other Library of Congress classification info except novel/memoir distinction on the copyright page, and constantly has the protagonist call himself by Nabokov’s name yet reference only novel titles that I’m almost certain Nabokov didn’t use while referring constantly to this here narrative as a memoir.

Why does any of this matter when the writing is pleasantly zany (it begins “I met the first of my three or four wives…”), witty, and eloquent in the slightly baroque manner that crashes and burns in hands any less delicate than Nabokov’s? His rambles through his love lives and professional progress are entertaining and revealing without much of a central theme but with plenty of self-depreciation disguised as arrogance that gradually lets you realize just exactly how seriously he isn’t taking himself. And he still knows when to reign that in to show quieter, genuine emotions (not a whole lot, but it’s there when it needs to be, like when his first wife died).

I just want to know how or if he writes his fiction differently than his self-examining. The New York Times review from 1974 tells me this was Nabokov’s last novel published before his death in 1977. It’s classified as a fictional autobiography – okay. So that makes total sense, and as far as this Constant Reader is constantly concerned, it’s a bookshelf-worthy success, right between my David Mitchell and Phillip Pullman.

I bought this at last year’s South Caroline Book Festival (three for a dollah, y’all: that’s also where I got A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and that giant-ass hard sci-fi anthology, so I AM MAKING THE OLD BOOK PILE PROGRESS HOO-YAH) because I wanted to read Nabokov. Ideally Lolita, but that wasn’t on sale there.

Yes, I realize I could go to Barnes and Noble or the Books-a-Million across the street from my Barnes and Noble or the stacks on the other side of the wall from my office or not leave my apartment and find this on Amazon, but two things:

1.   Found books are more fun.
2.  Lolita sounds creepy. I know it’s literature and I want everybody to write about whatever they want and not get censored. But it’s still creepy and I will have to prepare myself more than when I read about other stuff.  

Blood and death row in literary nonfiction

Book: In Cold Blood

Author: Truman Capote

Published: 1965 (original; Vintage)

Modern classic turns out to be good read!

I know. I was shocked too.

But let’s take a minute to talk about why. Capote does that nifty thing where he combines novelistic details with an almost invisible journalistic style to present a clear narrative of a gruesome murder case. He starts broad by alternately describing a perfect Kansas family and developing the schemes of a criminal duo until the two groups collide.

A curtain is delicately drawn over the act itself until way down the chronological road, when the murderers are caught and confess. That’s after the initial public outcry has died to a discontented paranoid murmur and after the story has flattened out into tracing the criminal proceedings.

Throughout the story, Capote does a great job of reconstructing the criminals’ thoughts, histories, plans, and conversations. Almost too good a job that draws you out of the narrative a little to wonder exactly how much access he had to all this, and how, and what he’s possibly made up as a result of possibly lacking said access.

But once they’re caught, a lot of it gets repeated or summarized as evidence, and neither guy has much else to think about once they’re isolated on Kansas’s death row for five years. Their joint hanging is covered as an unsettling anti-climax; the story ends a little later on an emotional note that is elegant enough to again make me wonder how much was neatened up.

Those wonderings mattered to me but only as an object of curiosity that went along with the rest of the reading experience. I was also astonished at how different the style was compared to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my other Capote encounter – the flourishes of fiction were gone, just like surgically removed or shaved down just enough to show the plain frame of good narrative. I’ve no idea how he did that but it works super well.

So in a public service announcement that will knock your fedora into its proper angle, you should read Truman Capote and start with this book in which he demonstrates his skills without ever seeming to. (That’s a good thing!) 

Views from abroad

Book: Granta: What Happened to Us? Britain’s Valedictory Realism

Author: various

Published: 1996

Pages: 254

This is the only literary journal I’ll formally review – er, scribble about here. Mostly because I’m trying to break further into the lucrative scene of contributors’ copies, but also because lit mags are relatively ephemeral more part of a continuous conversation that changes faster than books do. So to talk about a single issue is a little unfair but whatever. It’s all I got.

My college dorm had a row of Grantas on its common room bookshelf, where we could take and leave things as we pleased. You better believe I spent a good chunk of my final packing weekend on stealth raids. (Dudes, that’s where I found White Teeth.) This one issue came home with me because I had no idea how it would read and no room to stuff an entire set of quarterlies of unknown quality into my bed sheets.

How did it finally end up reading, almost two years later? Like a really honest British travelogue.

I’m not entirely sure which selections were fictions, which were histories, which were memoir – it all blended together in various proportions. Like, the first one, about a Parliament clerk and his frank tracing of the exploits he recorded and sometimes initiated – that one could’ve been a droll short story about government folly and how maybe it doesn’t matter as much as we think, or a wry memoir from an insider who’s more nostalgic than bitter about the trouble. The thing about Scotland and how its patriotic semi-rallying for independence is different than Ireland for under-the-surface reasons was definitely social commentary backed by historical facts; while the stuff about a man who meanders into becoming a social worker goes from personal to political over a few pages.

Two depressing bits:

• ·         A photographer’s text describing the vagabond lives of the people whose pictures he took and published in here described how their cheerful wandering morphed into drug-desperate poverty in less than two years.
• ·         A short story (autobiographical?) about a film director who keeps going back to his wastrel of a friend and sees how pathetic this friend has grown in his 40s by insisting on staying drunk and irresponsible, yet the matured protagonist still looks to this friend as a source of fun and wisdom.

Both of these pieces made me catch a glimpse of how desperate life can be, just surviving or trying to find meaning. I had to put it down and go watch The Next Great Baker (like that actually helps transcend any kind of soul-crushing banalities – ooh, piping!).

Overall, though, I enjoyed this string of glimpses into the U.K. through its writing samples. It’s different now, seeing as how this journal could get a driver’s license if it were a person, but I’m putting it on my bookshelf for posterity.