Taking "Read or Die" a bit too literally.

I think I might have read five books in the last seven days. Graduate school is kind of insane. I just keep reading. I take the train so that I can read on my commute, I read when I get home, I read over dinner, I read when I wake up. Yesterday I did three things: go to work, go to class, and read a novel from start to finish. I'm hosting a party tomorrow (you should all come, if you're local: Catgirl Goth Rave!) and I'm sort of afraid that I am going to get up and dance for four hours and then sit down in the midst of flashing lights and thumping beats and keep reading. For extra bonus points, I'm reading at least one apocalyptic book a week, sometimes two. All of humanity dies inside my head on a weekly basis. It can stop now.

Here are some mini-reviews of some of the books I've been reading:

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart: Apocalyptic novel written in 1947. Totally made me cry, and gave me nightmares too! But brilliantly written, especially in how it weaves through time at different speeds. It's set up as a triptych much like Leibowitz is, but with something in between to sate my desire for continuity a bit more than Miller is willing to give me. Genuinely suspenseful while thought-provoking; genuinely sympathetic characters that I nonetheless wanted to reach into the book and smack around. The pacing had me a little suspicious from a realism perspective but I was happy to forgive those little doubts to embrace the book as a whole.

Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller: Post-nuclear apocalyptic novel written in the Fifties. Also engaging, and with a fascinating treatment of a post-nuclear Catholic church and the quest to rebuild knowledge. Essentially three related novellas; harder to swallow than most apocalypses without acceptance of the supernatural. While a couple of the devices felt like Miller was trying to make a symbol and not showing me where the symbol pointed, it's still a book that will stick in my head for quite a while. It's also a breezy and pleasurable read that I would recommend to anyone who is really into books. (Books as objects or symbols, as opposed to reading texts.) If I wanted something that really dug into what language and religion would be like after the collapse of civilization, though, I'd pass on Canticle's too-familiar Church and Earth Abides's comfortable familiarity as well, and go directly to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald: Heavy-handed nuclear apocalypse novel, written as the diary of Push-Button Operator X-127, who is trained to push buttons that launch nuclear missiles and lives in a bunker 3500 feet below the surface of the earth. A little on the didactic side, but genunely engaging, at least in part because it makes such good use of the diary form. I don't know that I'll re-read it --- I've gotten the message that nuclear war is bad and that mutually assured destruction is crazy fragile --- but it makes me want to re-read A Handmaid's Tale to compare the diary forms, and pushes me to finally get to We.

Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth: I read this book purely for pleasure. Not for class, not for work, not for the class I'm teaching, nothing. Just curious about it. Well worth the time spent --- it's a number of stories striated together like heart muscle, all of them interconnected but independent, overlapping but discontiguous. I think she shares a lot of my influences and admirations from how she considers names and labels and careful descriptions secondary to tricks of language and trying to cut into motivations and compulsions. [1] There's a little Pynchon-Wallace conspiracy nut in here, too, just enough to satisfy the taste without getting lost inside a Mason & Dixon or somesuch. Her flash fiction is hit or miss for me, though the hits are way on target; this novel was definitely a solid hit. Apparently she's reading in Boston in December, I'll probably go.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto: Featuring a minor passing character, this was technically not entirely for pleasure, though I mostly read it because liquidjewel  recommended it more than anything else. It reminded me a lot of Norwegian Wood by Murakami, though more compact, feminine, and careful. Apocalypse in microcosm, death before its time, the unexpected sloth of desperation. Murakami caught the sloth and just the slowness better, but Yoshimoto's characters were much more engaging to me. It comes with a free short story, 1/3 the words and with extra magical realism!

McSweeney's 19: This is the box with a bunch of old propaganda and then some stories and a novella by T. C. Boyle. The novella, Wild Child, is wonderful and I highly recommend it. For the most part, the fiction in the collection seems to be actively chafing against realism, working against the boundaries of the completely absurd with a chisel. In some ways this is awesome, and the shorter bursts of it are actually rather pleasant, especially Adam Golaski's three-page reinterpretations of classic paintings. (He's now an editor at Flim Forum press; I bought a couple of their first anthologies, I need to read those. Also, around ten years ago, he opined at a poetry slam that he couldn't stick his dick into another dimension. Remembering this allowed me to totally embarrass him at Readercon. :) One or two of the pieces of short fiction just bounced off of me, though; I'm actually working on a paper focusing on this issue of McSweeney's, [2] along with Issue 17, right now. I had previously started this issue but given up when two stories in a row bounced and never made it to the novella; I'm glad I came back.

OK, I'll stop at six. If you're local and want to borrow any of these, let me know!

[1] At least, these are things I try to do. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily as successful. :)

[2] LJ's spellcheck says that McSweeney's might have meant "Waxwings." Sadly, the band name is already taken.