Nazis, Bees, and Murder, Oh My!

So I finally finished my giant slog through every possible awfulness that World War II could possibly present, all 900+ pages of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. God. This is one of those well-reviewed books that I have a hard time believing anyone actually read. I mean, I admire the effort. It seems to be impeccably researched - he has an intimate knowledge of every possible detail of the workings of the SS, the Russian front, the camps. And I feel, having finished it, a small sense of what it must have been like to live through it: the nauseating evil alternating with the boredom of the routine banalities of war administration...the feeling that you think you've seen the lowest humanity can go and then things sink lower. He rubs your face in extremity after extremity...cruelty, pornography, feral children. Suffice it to say, I felt like I needed a shower when I finished. I also felt very, very lucky.

So as a palate cleanser, I turned to some lighter fare: Doug Coupland's Generation A and a mystery by J.A. Jance. The Coupland was different than I expected. The title leads you to expect something very similar to his famous Generation X, but it reminded me a bit more of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down: multiple narrators building on each other, giving a new perspective on the same events. It was fun and a little depressing at the same time, especially in contrast with a New Yorker article I read this week on psychiatry and drugs, The mystery (which I can't even remember the title of) was an overlap of two of her stock characters, Joanna Brady and J.P. Beaumont. These are totally a guilty pleasure: the writing is pretty clunky, the mysteries aren't ever that mysterious, but they feel like drinking diet coke - they keep your mind occupied while being somehow restful.

School has been presenting me with some lovely writing: Hamlet and In Cold Blood. Capote's sentences are amazing and I'm always a sucker for Hamlet's words...How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem all the uses of this world...

So I've worked my way through everything I had out from the library. Time to start looking!