Books!

Thanks to Ashalyn, it has come to my attention that I am woefully behind on keeping my books of 2010 list updated. I'm also shamelessly steeling her idea to review books, so that you might read them (or at least look them up).

So, first of all, Books of 2010, as of 18 February:

1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
5. Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

And, yes, I am aware of the fact that the list is over half Sherlock Holmes. I've been working through the canon off and on since New Year's Eve and I'm not going to bother going through them in any sort of review. You've all heard of Sherlock Holmes and, if you've never read any, you ought to. The individual short stories aren't long, there are just a lot of them. The other books are for Apocalyptic Lit and I'm going to talk about two of them.

1. Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
This is a great example of '70s southern existentialism. It takes place at an unspecified point in time in the south and is about a psychologist (a self-identified bad Catholic) named Thomas More. Tom has been mentally ill himself, and he's invented a device to diagnose maladies of the soul and one day, if he ever perfects it, to treat them. The whole story happens over the course of a few days and it's not linear - a good portion of the novel is Tom recalling what happened after the fact, as he lays under a tree at what he believes to be the end of the world. There's a lot of the Book of Revelation throughout and I won't spoil the ending, but it's a pretty good read.

2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon is weird. In fact, Pynchon is very weird, and this novel is evidence of that. It's about a woman named Oedipa Maas, who is named co-executor of a recently-deceased ex's estate and, while she's trying to deal with that, maybe stumbles upon a centuries old conflict between two mail delivery companies and the secret society that seems to surround the one that no longer exists. But really, when you get past the plot (Oedipa gets obsessed with this simple drawing of a muted horn that she starts seeing everywhere and spends days chasing after what seems to be a huge plot, but might in fact just be her imagination, or a practical joke, or something else entirely), it's about entropy. It's very '60s, very postmodern, and I loved it. It also makes me want to start drawing the Trystero horn in random places, to join the maybe-conspiracy.

But I've heard this book referred to as one of the most grating, incomprehensible novels ever written and feel like it's one of those things you'll either love or hate. So you might not have my reaction to it.

And now I'm reading Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, which is great. I love the film adaptation (starring Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, and Robert Downey Jr), so I felt like it was time to read the novel. It's about writers and writing and failing to write, and is both darkly funny and true to life. Maybe not for people who don't write, but for those of us who do. I'm currently about a third of the way through, but since I've seen the film a few times I know the general shape of the plot. As tends to be the case, the book is even better than the film, and it's a good film, so I'm very happy.