Missing Review Catch-Up

Though originally when I started this blog I wanted to fully review every book I read, the next two years of haphazard blogging proved that, for me, this was going to be impossible. It's not really anything to do with the amount of free time I have, but instead related to the main plan behind this blog in the first place; to push myself into becoming a better and more productive writer. Although trying to review everything helped with the latter aspect, it seemed to make the former harder when I came up against books that I simply didn't have the knowledge (or sometimes desire) with which to write a half-decent appraisal. The nadir of this came when I tried to write a review of established philosophy classic Fear and Trembling (which I keep accidentally writing as Fear and Loathing every damned time) by Soren Kiekergaard. It was less a review and more of an admission of incompetence.

So the best thing to do to tackle the few books I've read over the past year without fully reviewing them would be to put together a series of mini-reviews in one post, just to put my obsessive compulsive mind at rest- and as if by magic, here's a bunch of them right here. For those curious, the main reasons why I've skipped full reviews of certain books are that they're either too short, too technical, or too classical for me to put my ugly stamp on them.

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Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990/2004)

Paul Auster

I had no idea what Auggie Wren's Christmas Story was when I ordered it from Amazon a few months back. I'd never seen it in bookshops, rarely seen it listen in the usual 'also by this author' pages, and never looked at a summary on Wikipedia thanks to its mysterious and definitive red font colour status. I knew I had to have it regardless, since I'm working on a complete Auster collection, and was excited by the mystery of what this book might actually be. Obviously I worked out that it might be a story about Christmas.

When the Amazon package turned up at my door (well, my mother's door actually, since my apartment doesn't have a big enough letterbox for parcels, so I send them all to her), the mystery was revealed and left me feeling like I'd been more than a little ripped off, but also I didn't mind too much. Auggie Wren's Christmas story, it turns out, was originally a short story commissioned by The New York Times way back in 1990, back when Auster was the new in-thing in the NY literary world thanks to The New York Trilogy. This 2004 edition is a small hardback re-release featuring art by Isol (a woman I didn't know anything about prior to this, but apparently is a very highly-regarded children's illustrator). At no more than a few thousand words, the story and images barely make 30 pages, making it automatically not worth buying if you're not a huge Auster fan.

The story is a very nice, thoughtful modern Christmas tale, one that embodies the more intellectual and introspective side of the season thanks to being utterly Auster in its nature. Written early in Auster's career as a novelist, it's very much in the mold of The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. I enjoyed it so much that I wish Auster would try out more short stories in the future. Unfortunately I didn't get the appeal of the art at all. Done in a style that I couldn't possibly name or even it seems describe, I didn't find it much to look at. Altogether then, considering the brevity of the text and non-interest of the art, it was a bit of a rip-off, but I'm in complete Auster fan-mode at this point in my life so it didn't really matter.

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The Disappearing Spoon- And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements (2011)
Sam Keane

The Disappearing Spoon was another attempt to try and break my way into somewhat understanding some aspects of science, since it seems to be the type of real world thing I should know something about, rather than just constantly writing about people and events that aren't real. Seriously though, I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable with science as I should be, so I'm at the point where I think trying to write a full review of a book like this would be redundant. In the past I have written a couple of science book reviews here (Elephants on Acid being the most recent), but The Disappearing Spoon fell short by addressing a subject I really needed some inspiration to get interested in and then not providing it. The book, if you didn't guess by the title, is about the elements and all that.

As a writer in the genre of popular science, Sam Keane's main task is to get on board all the stupid people like me who really don't know what he's talking about, by being affable and enthusiastic, while all the while leading them on a coherent path that somewhat resembles a narrative. He's okay at the former, but the latter is where this book really fell apart in my eyes, since it's essentially a collection of tangentially linked stories of scientific discovery and the occasional weirdness. As a result the book tackles human history just as much as scientific fact, which I appreciated, but once I'd finished I really didn't feel like I'd learned anything. That's probably mostly my fault, but it does mean that ultimately I can't particularly recommend The Disappearing Spoon as an enlightening read.

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 Signal To Noise (1992)
Neil Gaiman - Art by Dave McKean

I like Neil Gaiman, I really do, I'll read anything with his name on it, but I try not too expect too much each time. Gaiman has the mind of a genius storyteller, something he's proven time and time again over the years through his various short story collections, and of course his magnum opus (I love that phrase) the inestimably great The Sandman, a comic book series I've been meaning to write about on this blog for far too long but just don't have the courage. The problem is, in my opinion, that despite Gaiman's ability to develop a story like few others, his actual prose can often come up a little short. I don't think any of his longer novels can truly be called classics in the usual sense- alright, American Gods is probably a fantasy classic- and as such his best novel, again in my opinion obviously, was the co-authored Good Omens with Terry Pratchett. 

What I'm trying to say is that I wasn't surprised when I found Signal To Noise to be a very pretentious book with very little to offer, despite its creator's credentials. Providing the art for this graphic novel- for that is what it is- was Dave McKeane, most famous in comics for his artwork on Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum. Unfortunately I've never been particularly taken with McKean's neo-Gothic patchwork art style, as though it's very effective in establishing mood, I find it terrible at portraying a cohesive panel-to-panel story. I'm not sure how much of a part the art played in my lack of interest in the story, but it certainly played a part. The bottom line though was I found Gaiman's writing in Signal To Noise to be pretentious in its constant efforts to try and sound deep and meaningful, without any depth behind the attempted gravitas.

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 Doctor Faustus (1592)
Christopher Marlowe

To give it its full title, Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus will always hold a special place in my memory for being chronologically the first text I studied at University, in the English Literature department of a big university in a small town on the coast of Wales. Truth be told, I was never the most diligent student, and often if a book didn't take my interest I'd barely study it; especially if it was historically important and not particularly interesting to read today. Faustus, thank god, despite certain features that put me off, is still a rather entertaining play, and one that rewrote the old Germanic tale and defined the notion of the Faustian Pact. It's wordy influence crosses boundaries of interest for those who study Shakespeare (for Marlowe is his closest predecessor, to the extent that conspiracy theorists suggest they were the same person) and for those more into romanticism.

Personally I enjoy the bombastic, intentionally self-important tone of it all. My typical problem with the vast majority of classical literature in this vain is that I find extended decorative prose to be kind of annoying, frustratingly avoiding the issue of explaining things for the sake of sounding impressive and being classed as poetry. I'm way more of a fan of minimalism, as my love for Bukowski and Orwell hopefully shows. Marlow's Faustus, however, gets a pass from me in this respect because it's a very straightforward story with a straightforward plot, and the over-written dialogue to me represents the folly of Faustus' assumptions of self-control and Mephistopheles' amusement at his arrogance. I re-read the play recently since I found a nice hard-bound old copy also containing the rather similar topic of the review below. I much, much preferred Marlowe's work.

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Faust (1829)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  

I had to buy the hardback mentioned above, since though I already had a copy of Marlowe's Faustus somewhere on my bookshelves I'd never read the probably-even-more-fanous version of the folktale in Goethe's Faust, and needed to remedy that. I suppose that even beforehand I knew I most likely wasn't going to enjoy it a huge amount, especially since, unlike Marlowe's Faustus, Goethe's didn't have the advantage in my eyes of being associated with one of the definitive times of my life. There's also the consideration that my very slight exposure to Germanic literature so far had shown me that the style (translated, anyway), probably wasn't really for me thanks to the complete lack of humour and uber-seriousness.

As a result, I'm not going to try and properly review Goethe's Faust because I'm nowhere near capable of it. I can say that, reading it in 2014 (and taking a long time about it) reminded me that I don't like flowery poetry since I can't be bothered to spend the time doing the research to translate the antiquated terms or many intellectual references, and that's obviously my fault rather than the book. I'm sure that if I had a capable teacher leading me through it I would've enjoyed Faust, and maybe in the future I'll have reason to look at it again with more care.

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Complete Shorter Fiction (No idea what year and I've given up looking)
Oscar Wilde

I was optimistic about enjoying this Penguin collection of Oscar Wilde's Complete Shorter Fiction, having many years ago enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray, but as it turns out it didn't really happen. Wilde was far from a prolific prose author, hence this complete collection is a thin volume of some fairly random things, the most famous probably being The Canterville Ghost. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy or engage with any of these stories to anywhere near the same extent as Dorian Gray. Wilde's talent as a aesthetic writer is noticeable in every story, of course, but his style alone isn't enough for me, and I only have a very limited interest in the turn of the century British nobility. As a result I found myself deeply uninterested in a lot of these stories. 

Wilde also writes quite a few of his own fairy tales, included in this volume. They're okay, interesting at first but soon become repetitive, which is a feature not helped at all by Wilde's often-pompous prose style. I got a sense with each one of the stories in this collection that they were experimental writing exercises for Wilde to stretch and exercise his prose fiction muscles, and as a result of his reluctance to write in such a fashion very often (as opposed to his playwright career), he lacked the passion or methods to come up with many interesting short stories. I suppose I am glad I read it because it was interesting, just not as enjoyable as I hoped.

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That's it for now. I expect I'll have to do this again one day.