Reading Roundup, June 2009

For me, June has been a month of getting nothing done. Seemingly everything in my life, from writing to keeping up the house, seems unfinished — the lone exception to that being cases of Yuengling, of which I’ve finished two.  On the book front I’ve finished six, though one of those is a graphic novel and I have a hard time thinking of those as really counting.

But hey — I did read Dan Simmons’s Drood, which could crush a car if you dropped it from a highrise, so that counts as two books. Of course, I’ve yet to finish my review of the book (spoiler: it’s excellent), so that’s another tick in the ’slacking off’ column of this month’s tally. Along with, and in preparation for, Drood, I finished Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I started last month (actually, last year, but I challenge you to prove it to the satisfaction of a jury). But how do I count finishing an unfinished novel? See, even Dickens isn’t getting things done in June (a month that, as a matter of fact, figures prominently and ominously in Drood — and now you can see we have come full circle).

Beyond things Droodish we have things Egyptian — Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon, to be exact. Picking up the story of perpetual amnesiac Latro after some time has passed following the close of Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon moves the action to ancient Egypt with a trip down the Nile. Fans of the series know what to expect — gods, visions, an unreliable narrator, and Wolfe’s delicious ambiguity. Not my favorite of the series — the books set in Greece feel much more solidly realized and contain more that is interesting to me — but good nonetheless. The book begs a sequel.

Beyond those books, and in amongst the myriad anthologies I’m inching my way through — including two that I appear in, The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and Northern Haunts — I’ve managed to grab some time for non-fiction. I highly recommend Theodora Kroeber’s biography of the last ‘wild’ Indian of North America, Ishi in Two Worlds. In 1911 Ishi, a Yahi Indian, came down out of the North California hills after a lifetime of secrecy and privation. He entered the white man’s world, and soon adjusted remarkably to life amongst academics and staff at the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology, in San Francisco. The book is a fascinating look not just the culture of the Yahi, but at Ishi’s adjustment to his radically new environment. More than just a work of anthropology, this is a true biography, and Ishi is revealed as an individual and not merely a type or representative of tribal man.

Following a recommendation of a friend of mine, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Bryson is a travel writer and humorist, and his attempt to hike the Appalachian trail as described in A Walk in the Woods is at turns profoundly interesting and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Bryson, accompanied by a old friend who seems a magnet for trouble, experiences the trail life at its best and worst, on the way encountering odd people, places beautiful and strange, and wildlife most of us have not seen outside a nature documentary. What he gains is a new sense of the vastness and grandeur of the American wilderness, and a new appraisal of his own character as well. The book really made me want to go hike or camp — until I remembered Lyme disease, bear attacks, and hypothermia. Regardless, I’ll definitely be getting some more by Bryson in the future.