Quiet, Please…

Quiet, Please: Dispatches for a Public Librarian
By Scott Douglas

A review where I find I’m writing more about myself than the book at hand, only because the farther along I read in the book the more I saw myself in the book — which might not be the best way of reading a memoir.
(note: this is word for word my review that I also wrote on Goodreads.com–but I meant to actually put it here first, so I consider it a blog review for the book, rather than a goodreads review for the book. The distinction is a minor one and only matters to me, but now you know too. You’re a very very lucky person to know this fact.)

When I first came across this book I thought ‘oh cool – a book about being a librarian’, then I thought it will be nice in the biography section with the other book that came out a few months ago about being a librarian, and I’ll mean to read it and probably not, or at least until it comes out in paperback, and then maybe still forget about it. Then though I happened to open the book up to an early page and noticed first footnotes (and not that I would phrase it as a man-crush like the author does, I will admit being a complete sucker for David Foster Wallace (and Thomas Pynchon, but not Mark Twain who I avoid like the plague because of a horrible first experience with him at the hands of an incompetent English teacher)), which (I’m back on footnotes here) are an instant selling point to me and on the same page the story about trying to impress a librarian by reading Thomas Pynchon, only to find out the librarian thinks Pynchon is maybe some actor in a Julia Roberts movie. That’s all I needed to see, the book went right on top of my to buy pile of books and actually made it out of the to buy pile in the first week it was there (no little feat let me tell you, books can live in that pile for quite awhile).
Parts of the book were a little disheartening, since I’m currently enrolled in Library School, and hearing some of the bad things about being a librarian, and the way he questioned his decision to become one and stuff, but as the book went on I found myself seeing that it’s not so bad, and that a lot of the humorous horror stories he’s relating could be lifted out of my own experiences working at the bookstore, with maybe a few little details changed (for example, he has a patron come up and tell him there is a man sleeping in a restroom stall, I had a woman come up to me and tell me there was a woman scratching her skin off in the ladies room, or perverts jerking off on the computers compared to some guy blowing his wad on a woman’s leather jacket (while she was wearing it) in the Woman’s Study aisle). Besides taking an amused solace in similar kinds of experience I also loved reading his short tales of going to Library School. I was also happy to find out that there is some kind of web-page out there for Librarians with Tattoos, it’s nice to know that in the future I could belong to something bigger than myself.
I found the book to be overall really enjoyable, I’d recommend it to people, especially people who don’t work in places where the homeless and crazy come to spend their days just for the wonderfully bizarre tales they bring with them.
Good stuff.

Because I haven’t this week, and so I must….

Consider Phlebas
by Iain M. Banks

This is the second of his books that I’ve read in the past week or so. The other one I didn’t write about but it was called The Game Player, and it was better than this one. It was kind of like Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, but kind of cooler with mutilations and stuff like that. Like HH’s book though neither author ever really got down to describing what such a complex game would really be like, which I would be interested to know about, but oh well.
This book wasn’t quite as good, it’s part of the same series, a series I now realize is mostly out of print. It’s more of a traditional space opera I guess, I don’t read much Sci-Fi, so I’m just throwing out terms here. I liked the book when there wasn’t action going on, the general ideas of the book and the relationships between the utopian Culture and other societies I liked, and the idea of the Culture I find quite interesting, and the end notes giving the back story to the war going on in the book I found on the fascinating side. What I could stand though were drawn out fighting scenes and battles, I know these are the parts I’m supposed to find exciting, but I just couldn’t get into those scenes, and I found myself either reading at an abonormally fast rate (as if I was in the thick of it all), or just zoning out and realizing I was reading with no retention. Fortunately there were only a few of these moments in the book.
This posting turned out longer than I thought it would be. I planned on writing only that I read it. But taa-daa a real life posting.

The Book of Other People

The Book of Other People

   edited by Zadie Smith

   I’m only in the middle of reading this right now (or to be more specific, about three quarters of the way through the book, maybe slightly less since I’m saving the Dan Clowes story for the end), but so far this is one of the best anthologies I’ve read in quite awhile.  Actually it’s the best anthology I’ve read since I started working at Barnes and Noble.  

A good anthology I think, like a good record compilation, should make the reader want to go out and read other books or stories by the authors, and that this book succeeds at that.  The basis of the collection is for authors to write about a character, make a character up and drive the story with their character.  The results are very interesting, which isn’t much of a surprise since most of the authors I’m familiar with here are amazing authors at writing character driven fiction, as opposed to plot driven fiction (which is something that is leveled as an attack at this particular breed of authors (of which I’m thinking more of the Eggers, Smith, Saunders clique), when books such as A Readers Manifesto attacks contemporary fiction).  

Two thoughts about the book at the mid or three quarter mark.

1)  The absence of David Foster Wallace seems to permeate the book.  A lot of the writers who I enjoy in this book are regularly compared for better or worse to him. This seems to be an anthology he’d fit right into, and it would have been better than amazing to have some new fiction to read from him. I can only imagine that he wasn’t able to write anything for this book because he’s too hard at work at the eventual follow-up to Infinite Jest.  

2)  The last anthology I really liked was Speaking with the Angel, edited by Nick Hornby.  A fair amount of authors from Hornby’s collection are in this one too, but that was the last anthology that I read which made me want to search out and get books by various authors in it.  

2.1)  I believe that I would also enjoy Ben Marcus’s collection The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, but I wouldn’t count the book as a success for this since most of the authors that I like in that collection I’ve already read the stories in the anthology.  That is one of the things I don’t like about anthologies – either they are collections of already released material, that in the case of my favorite authors I’ve already read, or they are composed of a good story or two and then a lot of throw away work (like the first McSweeney’s anthology of Thrilling Tales edited by Michael Chabon, I couldn’t bring myself to try the second one).  

Chapel Road

Chapel Road

Louis Paul Boon

I finished this book the other day.  Thursday actually.  Once again the world has proven to me that their is still much to be found in it.  I’d never heard of Louis Paul Boon before noticing Summer of Termuren when it arrived at the store a few weeks ago.  SOT looked like the kind of book I normally get excited about.  First half of the 20th century gloom and doom, idealism being destroyed by the waves of history, that kind of thing. I was about to buy the book, when I saw that it was the follow up to this novel, so I had to pick it up first.  It’s just wrong to read books out of order.  

This book is set sometime in the 19th century, it’s also set sometime following the second World War.  The book alternates between the writing of the story of Termuren in the 19th century at the dawn of Socialism, and in the ‘present day’ (the book being written in the 1950’s) as an author named Boon tries to write the novel about Chapel Road.  Since this isn’t confusing enough already for me to write, I’ll add that also in N1 (N1 being used to designate the story of a writer Boon and his friends, as opposed to N2 which is the story the writer Boon is writing within the novel N), there is a running fable of sorts that’s a take off of the poem Reynard the Fox.  

In N1, the characters are living in a Socialist state.  In N2 the characters are living in pre-socialism, and the ideas of Socialism are equal to godlessness in the eyes of most of the people.  In both of these settings there is a poverty of real life present, and the book is in a sense a setting up of why did Socialism fail, or maybe why is it still basically the same society but under a different name.

I’m failing miserably.  I can’t describe this book easily. It’s wonderfully post-modern, and possibly the first post-modern novel with it’s self-reflexive storytelling.  Reading this novel isn’t for everyone, I can imagine people finding it boring, and it’s not really until you start to think about the different stories and characters in particular relations that aren’t spelled explicitly by the author that new and wonderful dimensions open up.  

Maybe once I read SOT I’ll be able to write a better description of this novel.  The only thing I guess I can really say is that this novel is definitely worth reading, and once again I have Dalkey to thank for putting back into print an amazing piece of literature that probably would have never crossed my path if it hadn’t been for them.