Off the tracks a little...

So while I should have had plenty of time to read in February (a week of vacation, reading-friendly bad weather), I got derailed by a book. I started reading The Kindly Ones in early February and it has just completely bogged me down. It was well-reviewed and sounded interesting to me (WW II through the eyes of a conflicted Nazi), but it's killing me a little. It goes from being an interesting character study to an in depth military history of the Russian front, with detailed discussions of the internecine warfare of the various camps of the German command, in the blink of an eye - in short, from fascinating to deadly boring in roughly 2.5 seconds. I hate to say boring, because it drives me nuts when my students say it about anything, but that's really all I got. So every night, when I go to read in bed, I get about three pages done (and I'm usually a 30-50 pages a sitting AT least kind of reader) and my eyelids start getting heavier and heavier and heavier....And considering the book is around a thousand pages, it's beginning to take on a Sisyphean feel. I'm not giving up on it though - there's enough interesting there to keep me going and I feel like the author has sort of thrown down the gauntlet...it's a matter of honor now.

So I had to take a break from it for a little bit, largely because I had two books on short term loan from the library and they were starting to rack up fines. I had a reading frenzy at the end of my vacation, knocking off two decent length books in as many days. The first was Zadie Smith's Occasional Essays, which I loved, but made me feel bad. Her writing is terrific - a light touch with a powerful intelligence behind it. And our tastes are similar; she writes with love about both E.M. Forster and David Foster Wallace, two of my favorites who have little in common. The depressing part is that I really, really wish I could write as well as she does. I rarely have this feeling reading novels; I've always known that was never going to be my forte, I'm much more interested in reading stories than creating them myself. My one great literary idea is more about reading than it is about an original story. But many of her essays are really readings more than they are writing...and she's a damn good reader. I envy her that more than the novels.

My second book was The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. I loved Possession back in the day; it completely fueled my fantasy of what academia would be like (a notion I was quickly disabused of upon entering graduate school), but her other books have disappointed. This one was somewhere in between. I liked her world of late Victorians, I learned a lot about ceramics, puppetry, and women's medical education, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that she could have used a more energetic editor. A little Dickensian - all the ends tied up - but I have no problem with that.

So now I'm back to The Kindly Ones, not feeling too kindly...I'm sure he wants me to really feel the banality of the horrors of the Nazi organization, but there is a limit to the dedication of the reader. We'll see if I'm up to the challenge or not.