Chamber Four » Michael Hastings

Literary Beach Books, Part 7

Michael Hastings — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:01:10 +0000

Here’s the 7th and final part of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

I’m in the process of moving, and many of my books remain packed. So I was going to do these recommendations sans-text. But, after giving it more thought, I felt that would be quite lazy and irresponsible of me. Using the Internetz, I took the middle path: for each book, I went to the Amazon.com “Surprise Me!” feature and chose a line from the randomly selected page to give you a sense of what the novel’s about.

Lunar Park, by Brett Easton Ellis

What happens when Brett Easton Ellis moves to the suburbs? Very, very, bad things. Think Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road meets Stephen King’s The Shining.

The plot is pretty simple: our narrator, Brett Easton Ellis, recovering addict and literary celebrity, lives in a haunted house with a semi-famous wife and a twelve year old kid whose friends keep disappearing. The ghosts are many: his career, his fictional characters, a stuffed animal called a Terby, his own father. As Brett’s mid-life crisis intensifies, so do the night terrors. We turn the pages to see how he survives.

For my money, this is Ellis’s greatest novel to date. It’s also my favorite “literary novel” of the past few years. I wish I’d never read it so I could read it again this summer. Like all of Ellis’s books, really, it’s a modern day horror story, characters tormented by emptiness, confusion, nihilism, Prada, ambition, family, expectations and, this time around, actual ghosts.

Surprise Me!: “It was an indictment of not only the way of life I was familiar with but also—I thought rather grandly—of the Reagan ‘80’s, and, more indirectly, of Western Civilization at the present moment.”

Platform, by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who specializes in pissing people off. I don’t know why the easily offended take the bait every time—some folks must get as much joy from righteous indignation as the provocateurs get from provoking it. Over the years, I’ve recommended this book to a number of people. The response is either “Thanks, a masterpiece!” or “You’re a sick bastard for even thinking I would like this.” So be warned.

The narrator is a French bureaucrat, the caustic Michel Renault. Michel thinks that the only way Western men can find pleasure in sex is to find submissive Asian women in Thai massage parlors. Michel sort of realizes he’s wrong after he meets Valerie, a successful and rich middle-aged French chick.

Beneath the book’s controversies (the above mentioned sex tourism, as well as Islam, orgies, the death of Western civilization, etc.), Platform is a powerful love story between Michel and Valerie. The two find each other, and within each other they find the limits of pleasure. The book pretends to take the tone of what one could call a typical French post structuralist “modern life has no meaning so smoke another Gauloise” attitude. But that’s Houellebecq being clever. The book falls on the side of meaningfulness, just not where we’d expect. (At a sex resort.) I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it’s worth reading to the final page. And it takes place on the beach.

Surprise Me!: “She was getting quite angry too; I could sense that it wouldn’t be long before she mentioned human rights.”

Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart

I read Absurdistan slowly because I wanted to savor the humor. The book is that funny, especially if you’re ever had the misfortune of spending time in any country with a ‘Stan suffix. (Or an ‘aq syllable, for that matter.) It’s essentially a send up of all the clichéd and way too serious émigré and exile novels you’ve ever read. At the same time, it’s a hilarious tale of America’s cluelessness and excessive meddling, the massive stupidity and greed in the local Absurdsistan-like cultures that make them ripe for meddling, and the uber-rich Russian oligarchy.

It’s the Catch-22 for the age of American Empire. (I just noticed that the Washington Post review also compares it to Catch-22, so my observation here is less than original. A few more Googles tells me that everybody (except Michiko Kakutani) seems to love the book. Despite the daily NYT pan, it was named by the Times as one of the Ten Best in 2006.)

I didn’t need “Surprise Me!” for this one—I knew my favorite line memory. “During the thirties and forties, Stalin had killed half my family. Arguably the wrong half.”

Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

In Old Man’s War, retirement is when the action starts. The brilliant conceit: Earth, engaged in a number of intergalactic battles, meets its recruitment goals in the Colonial Defense Forces by signing up retirees who’ve agreed to a genetic treatment that makes them superhuman kick-ass warriors. The treatment also allows them to live for generations more (as long as they don’t get killed). Our hero is John Perry, an everyman of sorts, if you will, who finds himself in a series of classic Starship Trooperesque situations.

It’s the best science fiction book I’ve read in the past few years, and I’d put it in my personal top ten sci-fi novels of all time. Yes, all time. Plus, it’s got a bunch of sequels, so you can lose yourself for a good week or two in Mr. Scalzi’s universe.

Surprise Me!: “Viveros waited for the cease-fire order, walked over to the puddle that was left of Bender, and started stamping it furiously. ‘How do you like your peace now, motherfucker?’ she cried as Bender’s liquefied organs stained the lower half of her legs.”

Reading the Kindle 2

Michael Hastings — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:30:00 +0000

You can curl up with the Kindle 2. I’ve done it. On the couch, in bed, stretched out in my favorite chair in the living room. I’ve fallen asleep with the Kindle 2 resting softly on my chest. It’s even passed the critical bathroom test, a must for any serious reader. (I’ll spare you the details, but I’m more careful about not getting it wet than a book.)

I’ve had my Kindle for three weeks. It’s my first ereader. I haven’t tried any others. I got it because: A) I wanted to see how the reading experience compared to paper; B) I buy a lot of books for research, and carrying them around while I travel is a hassle; C) from an obnoxious writerly perspective, I’m interested in questions of style—that is, if writing a book that might be read primarily on an ereader would require or lead to any change in how one writes, and if those changes are at all desirable or necessary; D) I’m a book addict; and, similar to A, E) can reading ebooks give the same soul impacting, consciousness transforming, altering-the-way-you-see-the-world kind of experience that the greatest books I’ve held in my hands and read cover to cover have provided for me during my lifetime? (For this post, I’m going to just stick with talking about A.)

There have been quite a few objections to ereaders, and I can appreciate the concerns. So far, though, my impression is that ereaders and ebooks, in the end, will be great for readers, publishers, and writers. I don’t think it’s a question of “either/or” of ebooks versus paper books, but “and/in addition too.” My guess is that ebooks and paper books will comfortably coexist for at least the next few decades. Bookstores aren’t going anywhere. Literature and democracy and civilization shall remain intact. But I’ll leave the crystal ball gazing to others, and focus on what I’ve enjoyed so far with the Kindle.

The ereading experience, I figured, would work best for nonfiction, gathering information or political commentary or whatever, more like using the Internet than reading a novel. I didn’t think I’d be able to “get into” a book, or “lose myself in the story,” those states of being one achieves with the best fiction and the occasional nonfiction. So the first book I downloaded for a trial run was a work of journalism, Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement—he’s an author I know I like.

Result: I read it quickly, enjoying it as much as had his two previous books I’d read on paper (Smells Like Dead Elephants and Spanking the Donkey). I then decided to put the Kindle to the extreme test—Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Didn’t make it very far, but I usually don’t make it very far with Tolstoy. (I swear I will someday.) It was strange, too, to tackle a novel so noted for its sheer heft—perhaps it did seem a little less impressive when eTranslated.

A day later, I noticed Amazon was offering a promotion, giving away a few genre books, each one the first installment in a series. I downloaded all of them (they were free, after all) and started in on Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

And, with Mr. Robinson, I was off to that blissful otherworldly readerly place. I lost myself in his book, couldn’t wait to pick up the cool looking white tablet and find out what happened next, and read all 376 pages in two days. The promotion worked too, because as soon as I finished I purchased the second book in his trilogy, Green Mars. (There’s something fitting about reading sci-fi on an ereader; it adds to the feeling, as John Scalzi mused about recently, that we’re living in a sci-fi novel right now. Cue music from A Scanner Darkly.)

I credit Amazon here with designing the Kindle to be an actual reading experience. It blew away my expectations. It’s not like looking at text online, on a computer screen (I got my ereader as a gift, so hadn’t done much looking into what ereaders were supposed to look like.) It’s something different. The digital ink technology gives it a print feel and look. I didn’t feel or act rushed like I do when I read online; I could take my time with each page.

The fact that it’s a device dedicated to reading is very important—not surfing, scrolling, checking email, instant messaging. There isn’t that same hectic multitasking, attention-deficit-disorder feel that one gets when scanning the Web. (I’ve never been able to get into any fiction that’s been published online.) The device recognizes (and respects) the fact that reading isn’t just digesting information. (A nice detail: whenever you put the Kindle down, it goes into a rest mode after a few minutes, and sketches of great writers appear on the tablet, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, etc.)

I know that reading an excellent sci-fi novel probably doesn’t pass the “serious literature” test in some folks’ eyes. (Though I would place Kim Stanley Robinson’s book next to any of the so-called serious literature being written today.) But so far, the Kindle 2 passed my nonfiction test, and it passed my reading great fiction for entertainment/escapism/fun test. Are there books that I’ll probably always want to read on paper? Yes—books that for whatever reason I want to hold, books for the shelf, books that have an important visual element to them (like this strange but fascinating book called Hollywood Bablyon that I just finished, which has all sorts of great tabloid like photos in it.) And books that I just feel like buying when I see them, as I’ll always continue to go into book stores–I love books, I love reading. And for those who seem to think the coming of the Kindle is the death of reading, I have to disagree. Anyone who’s willing to pay $359 for an electronic reading device probably loves reading quite a bit, too.

There are movies I love to watch on the Big Screen, and I’ll pay more and go out of my way to make sure I see them there. There are other movies that I’m content to wait for the DVD. Either way, I’m still watching movies, still supporting the movie biz. A similar kind of thing is probably going to happen with books—sometimes you’ll want to hold a book in your hand, have a copy for your bookshelf. Other times it’s just as cool just to read the book on the tablet.

I hope to pick up on some of the other themes I mentioned above in the weeks to come. If anyone else is thinking along those lines, would be great to hear your musings. A few random thoughts before signing off. For the record, I’ve found some faults with the Kindle. Not enough books available is my major gripe —I’m always clicking the “Tell the Publisher! I’d Like to Read This Book on Kindle” button). And, there’s a chance my enthusiasm will wane after it loses its newness factor. But as long as I can keep curling up with an ebook, I’ll stay converted.