This Week I are mostly reading (contd)

Have you read all the other books in between? What did you think of them?

Read and enjoyed All I did was shoot my man, Walter Mosley. It's by the writer of the Easy Rawlins series but set in contemporary New York. Same focus on crime, detectives/PIs, wealth and race concerns, etc. Same noir type focus and - tbh- a somewhat similar main character.

I did the same as with the Easy Rawlins series and jumped in somewhere in the middle. Previously that was by chance but this time consciously; I found with the other series that I enjoyed going back and reading the earlier books, getting backstory on the characters I'd already met, etc. Not sure how other readers feel about jumping into a series midway? I know I would have been allergic previously but Im coming around to the idea…

Finished Anne Rice's Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. Sadly, due to her death it turned out to be her penultimate book in the classic Vampire series. It's maybe a little bit different to the majority of the series in that it is less focused on vampires and their history and has more of an element of fantasy type book to it. A decent read but for me not quite at the same level as earlier vampire chronicles books.

My Father's House, Joseph O'Connor. Historic fiction (based on real life characters) on the escape line operating out of the Vatican in WWII, led by an Irish priest. I liked some of his previous books (Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls - didn't read the more recent ones) and this seems to be channelling Alan Furst-style wartime espionage vibes, so I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far.

Finished Jo Nesbo's crime thriller The Thirst. Another really good read and entry in his Harry Hole series.

It's a pity you can't have second thoughts first. I now realise that Dickens was more interested in exploring and exposing various aspects of the society of his time, rather than writing for entertainment, whereas Collins was all entertainment. That was the reason for the slow pace of Dickens’ narrative.

My first Dickens book was “A Christmas Carol”, borrowed from the library at a young age, and I found it tough enough going and for years I could not manage any of his other books. But when I decided to take my time and just follow the narrative without wondering what came next, or how it might finish, then I began to appreciate his writing style a lot more, and why he had become so popular.

In Dickens day books were the cheapest, most widely available form of entertainment; there was no television or radio for home consumption and the only other form of domestic amusement was music.

Sure you live and learn and it’s never too late for the latter.

I don’t like Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. The tortured intensity of his sentences at crisis points in his stories, and his rambling, dead prose, makes them seem, at times, like a bad translation of some minor Russian writer. As he wallows around in his Gothic mires, and the mind goes numb, trying to work out what it is all about, one fact becomes clear through the graveyard vapor: Mr Poe had no earthly interest in his characters. They are merely pieces of a story, or a verse, that he battered into place with a lump hammer.

I haven’t read a great deal of him, of course, but, because of his reputation, I made the effort on several occasions, and found that he is definitely not the kind of author you can relax with. It’s always a sign of a bad writer when you notice the writing, and you have no help, but to notice it with Poe, for his High Society form of constructing sentences is more interesting that the plot he is trying to put together. Then, again, he commits the cardinal sin, in writing, of using too many words to say too little. He does not know when to stop, or how to be sparse. An idea must be worried, like a dog at a bone, until every last shred of it is analyzed.    His books are prime candidates for condensation; only The Book Of Numbers, in the Bible, repeating facts more often, to a point of nausea.

How he has attained classical status is beyond me to understand. His The Raven, for example, after building up the expectation at a slow, meandering pace, with many purple Gothic phrases, simply stops when the author runs out of things to say. And there it stands, abandoned forever to the mists of time. El Dorado is another piece of verse which irritates me. It’s four verses read like an allegorical ballad, yet no conclusion is reached at the end of it. The narrator never tells us if the knight ever finds El Dorado, or if, with all the discouragement he meets, he simply gives up looking for it.

If Poe’s fiction and verse can produce mental indigestion, then his articles and reviews could give you a brain tumor, if you tried to read one from beginning to end, without a break. Writing about other writers is a sign that you have no fresh ideas of your own. (Why do you think I am writing about Poe?) It is glorious self-indulgence to dissect another writer’s works, to point out gleefully the mistakes you never make yourself, to wonder, why, in the name of God, people are paying money to read this unreconstructed tripe. In his articles, Poe’s delight in rummaging about among antique words and awkward phrases, is evident. He is a slave to grammar, forgetting that correct grammar does not automatically produce clear, understandable writing.

Poe is a minor writer, not a major one, although, because of his continuous profile in the 20th century, it begins to look as if he has now become part of the background of literature and will remain there, like a stone beside which gems look more glorious, or a weed that brings out the beauty of flowers.

Ah, the horror of it all!

Taking up the theme of horror writing, I used to love reading it until I came up against the real thing in a horror magazine which came out in the seventies. Up until then, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and his ilk, plus the supernatural type, had been the sort of horror story which gave one a good pleasant chill.

However, in the magazine I speak of, there were no supernatural elements at all, just plain human cruelty. To give two examples:

A man seduces an Eastern princess and then abandons her while she is on a visit to England. Her brother, the prince of that Eastern country, has the man kidnapped and brought to his own domain and put in a prison. Every day he visits him, accompanied by a surgeon who cuts off one piece of the man and then helps the wound to heal before repeating the visit. Eyes, one, two, ears, one, two, arms, legs . . . Thus the story finishes.

In the other one, a man convinced from childhood that “you become what you eat”, progresses to finally eating a living woman strung up on a meat hook. He comes to a bad end, himself. I avoid reading that sort of thing now and stick to the supernatural.

Oddly enough, Poe, himself, wrote factual horror stories, as in “Pit and the Pendulum” and ”The Black Cat”, but the sheer horror is lessened by the verbosity of the style.