I’ve been in one of my fiction slumps in 2008. Maybe it’s because a lot of my reading time has been usurped by parenting time, but it’s also more than that.
For one thing, I spend a lot more time online than I used to. The proliferation of blogs and the movement of print content onto the Internet has given me so much more access to information and entertainment that it’s even harder to turn away from than cable television used to be. (I disconnected the cable thinking it would give me more time to read and write, but now I spend all that time–possibly more–on the Web.)
The fiction I did manage to read during the first three months of Sean’s life was primarily short fiction. I read from the Best American Short Stories anthologies from this year and last. I read John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, which was amazing. I also read David Foster Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way which is collected in Girl With Curious Hair.
When I finally got around to reading a novel it was because of a movie I saw, No Country For Old Men. The movie is wonderfully ambiguous, and I thought the book might expound on certain characters a little more. Turns out, it doesn’t. It’s a page-turner, but the Coen brothers may actually handle the material more effectively than McCarthy does. It’s the sort of story that works really well on film.
I’m also finding myself drawn more and more to nonfiction. Much of this is for research purposes. In fact, the vast majority is, but every once in a while I get extremely curious about a subject and start reading all kinds of stuff about it. Lately it’s been crime. Don’t ask me why.
I’m starting to move back toward fiction though. I opened up Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers the other day, and I’m enjoying it. I also bought a couple of Hemingways at the bookstore: For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Shockingly, I have never read either of them.
Note: Edited to add a link in the final paragraph.
I also walked away from the cable, yet found myself sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop.
I’ll be interested in hearing what you thought of the Hemingway. I’m not a fan of A Farewell to Arms, but I loved For Whom the Bell Tolls when I read it in college. (I’m still waiting for the earth to move in my relationships.) It might be time to reread it.
School year almost over. That means I’ll have some summer reading time.
I enjoyed The Sun Also Rises and A Movable Feast. I couldn’t get through Islands in the Stream, though.
Tom, this is the old English and yearbook teacher, in case you had not already figured that out.
oh, and by the way, nice beard
For shame about the Hemingway–and you call yourself a fiction writer. Maybe it was just that UM education. Those of us at Albion actually read our Hemingway.
I wonder if Mr. Lanning has crashed any more Bobcats into his garage (or was it a shed?)–I seem to remember a story about that… probably 15 years ago. My how I have aged!
What? I read some of my Hemingway.
Rick, I knew it was you. I’d completely forgotten about the the garage incident.