The simple rule I follow for these Reading Roundups is to really only talk about the books I finish in a certain month, and not about the one’s I’ve dipped into or started that still have a bookmark sticking out of them. Then too, I don’t really talk about books I plan on reviewing in a more formal fashion, either, in order to avoid repeating myself. Which means some months will come across as rather skimpy, and might just lead the reader wondering what the hell the guy that constantly babels about striving to read more books is doing with his day, when he’s only got a handful of things to report in his monthly update.
Well, one thing that did take some time and energy away from reading books last month was organizing them, something you can read about over at John Ottinger’s Inside the Blogosphere. Then too, I seem to be in the middle of a record number of anthologies lately. So what did I read that I can talk about?
For starter’s there was Post Office, Charles Bukowski’s first novel, a mostly autobiographical account of his years working for the USPS. I was introduced to Bukowski through a collection of his shorts, and through a terrific biographical documentary Bukowski: Born Into This. Bukowski’s work is about booze and women and desperation, and I’ve joked that he reads a bit like Hemmingway with Tourette’s. But he is more than that, his is a unique voice that really explodes some of the romantic notions once held in this country about poverty and art. You feel a bit sleazy reading Bukowski, but you also feel strangely safe — safe because you know he’s got no time for anything but the truth. Post Office is funny and bleak and very readable, and seems like a perfect introduction to the man and his work.
I read another first novel in March as well, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory. I hadn’t read it for about five years or so, and it was the first thing by Banks that I read and really sparked my interest in reading more. Banks had tried for years to sell science fiction to no avail, and he finally ‘gave up’ and wrote a literary novel full of twisted characters, bad situations, and ugly violence. The Wasp Factory is unreliably narrated in first person by Frank, a teenager who freely admits to having murdered three relatives as a child. Frank has an elaborate, private system of rituals and behaviors which could be described as his own personal religion, which includes methods for protecting his home through totems, long-distance mental communication via the skull of a dog, and predicting the future through an elaborate device he has constructed in his attic, the Wasp Factory itself. The book is filled with strange secrets, and announces Banks as a real double threat in the areas of copious invention and imaginative violence. Weird, unsettling, and compelling — I can’t say The Wasp Factory was as rewarding the second time around as it was the first, but that’s only because I had already plundered all its secrets.
I also managed to squeeze in a few of the uniformly excellent Conan graphic novels from Dark Horse, from Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, in addition to a interesting urban fantasy/noir that I will be reviewing sometime this month.
