Stuff I Will Never Read
Jul. 11th, 2011 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleI was thinking the other day that I literally can't remember the last time I read any contemporary novel that wasn't in the fantasy/horror genre. I read (and re-read) non-genre novels by authors like Dickens and Bronte all the time, and a couple of months ago I found Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men during a bookshelf cleanout and I read that in a couple of days, but it must be at least ten years since I read any "ordinary" modern fiction.
When I was at the airport last week I was flipping through Time magazine and came across an article on summer reading, where famous authors were asked what they were planning to read this summer...and more than a few said that David Foster Wallace's The Pale King was tops on their list.
This is a book with a deceptively intriguing title. It makes me think of that great line from Revelation:
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
Brrr, right?
Well, The Pale King is about...IRS agents in Peoria, Illinois.
Now, I've never read anything by Wallace. He's one of those authors who is adulated by critics and his peers but man...I don't care how good of a writer he is, I don't want to read anything about IRS agents in Peoria, Illinois unless one of them starts conjuring Satan from his Rolodex while his cubicle-mate just happens to keep a sawed-off shotgun full of rocksalt in his desk.
Maybe I'm missing out and maybe novels like this would have something to teach me, but at this stage in my life, I honestly have no stomach to read anything about real people in real life, no matter how gifted the writer is. Seriously, here is an excerpt from a review of The Pale King:
"Richard Rayner in the Los Angeles Times writes that The Pale King's subjects are "loneliness, depression and the ennui that is human life's agonized bedrock, 'the deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and most which most of us spend nearly all of our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from' [quoting Wallace] ... The Pale King dares to plunge readers deep into this Dantean hell of 'crushing boredom,' suggesting that something good may lie beyond."
For the love of God! "This Dantean hell of 'crushing boredom'" already IS my life! Why on earth would I want to read a 560-page novel about it!?
I'd also never read anything written by someone who committed suicide while he was working on it. Part of that is superstition, but part of it is OMG THIS MAN COMMITTED SUICIDE WHILE TRYING TO WRITE THIS BOOK! WHY WOULD ANYONE READ THIS??!?!?
Give me wizards and elves and hobbits and hot demon-hunters and hell, you can even give me sparkly vampires and perpetually shirtless werewolves. Keep your loneliness, depression and ennui. I'm full up on that, thanks.
When I was at the airport last week I was flipping through Time magazine and came across an article on summer reading, where famous authors were asked what they were planning to read this summer...and more than a few said that David Foster Wallace's The Pale King was tops on their list.
This is a book with a deceptively intriguing title. It makes me think of that great line from Revelation:
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
Brrr, right?
Well, The Pale King is about...IRS agents in Peoria, Illinois.
Now, I've never read anything by Wallace. He's one of those authors who is adulated by critics and his peers but man...I don't care how good of a writer he is, I don't want to read anything about IRS agents in Peoria, Illinois unless one of them starts conjuring Satan from his Rolodex while his cubicle-mate just happens to keep a sawed-off shotgun full of rocksalt in his desk.
Maybe I'm missing out and maybe novels like this would have something to teach me, but at this stage in my life, I honestly have no stomach to read anything about real people in real life, no matter how gifted the writer is. Seriously, here is an excerpt from a review of The Pale King:
"Richard Rayner in the Los Angeles Times writes that The Pale King's subjects are "loneliness, depression and the ennui that is human life's agonized bedrock, 'the deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and most which most of us spend nearly all of our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from' [quoting Wallace] ... The Pale King dares to plunge readers deep into this Dantean hell of 'crushing boredom,' suggesting that something good may lie beyond."
For the love of God! "This Dantean hell of 'crushing boredom'" already IS my life! Why on earth would I want to read a 560-page novel about it!?
I'd also never read anything written by someone who committed suicide while he was working on it. Part of that is superstition, but part of it is OMG THIS MAN COMMITTED SUICIDE WHILE TRYING TO WRITE THIS BOOK! WHY WOULD ANYONE READ THIS??!?!?
Give me wizards and elves and hobbits and hot demon-hunters and hell, you can even give me sparkly vampires and perpetually shirtless werewolves. Keep your loneliness, depression and ennui. I'm full up on that, thanks.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-13 08:04 pm (UTC)I will also read anything Max Brooks writes, simply on the basis of having loved The Zombie Survivial Guide and World War Z.
Aside from that, I'm perfectly happy just to re-read my Stephen King and other horror novels and anthologies along with my Tolkien.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 12:19 am (UTC)I am just finishing up a Stephen King/Peter Straub book I purchased almost ten years ago and never read, Black House. It's a sequel to my beloved The Talisman and I have to say, it's been quite disappointing, as many sequels are.
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Date: 2011-07-14 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 11:22 pm (UTC)I also felt like Jack Sawyer, after being so vivid in The Talisman was just awfully flat. As were most of the characters. There seemed to be a lot of telling instead of showing, especially where Henry Leyden was concerned (I couldn't at all understand why he was so "amazing," aside from being a natty dresser). Everything about those bikers bored me silly, Sophie's appearance in the story was as out-of-left-field as Lisa Braeden's in SPN (and she's about as interesting as Lisa), and I just rolled my eyes over the whole holy baseball bat thing at the end (I've never synced up with King's veneration of baseball as Everything Good in the World.)
I don't know, maybe I'm just a more critical reader now than when I was sixteen, but I found this a wholly disappointing sequel to a book that I really cherished.