Once my semester hit its crunch-time span of weeks, I pretty well fell off the face of the mild earth, here. But, the semester is rapidly drawing to a close--I'm turning in my workshop portfolio tonight, and
that'll be it for class work. All I have left to do is build the online literary journal that my program is putting out. So I'll be around the
internet all the time up until its launch date (Monday), and will conceivably, therefore, write more of mild blog posts. Though all this computer hacking really does make me quite thirsty.
This will still involve some amount of figuring out what exactly it is that I have to say for myself. It continues to be one of the oddest things about being in grad school for creative writing, the busy-
unbusiness of it. Though, knowing that it's essentially a useless degree (the MFA) unless I publish a book or two is somehow reassuring. If nothing else, it's a license to waste three years of my life and, like, write, or whatever, so therefore I should be, like, writing blog posts, right?
I did read some number of books this semester, some for class, some outside of class. Here are the highlights:
Richard
Powers's The Time of Our Singing: As with most of
Powers's novels (in the first part of the late-Summer, early-Fall I read any of the remaining Powers novels that I hadn't read yet (except for his first three books), the main characters in this book are a combination of musicians and scientists, but this story has a scope which is perhaps only matched by
Goldbug Variations, but I think more "serious" in its thematics, in that it deals with 60 years or so and three generations of a mixed-race couple and their musical genius children. This is some of
Powers's strongest writing about music (though I always tend to find it believable). I'm not much of a gauge for his
sciencey writing, but I don't know that anyone does it better than Powers, and the science aspect is certainly secondary to the musical one in this book.
W. Somerset Maugham's
Of Human Bondage: Despite the fact that Maugham has been one of my favorite writers since I read
The Razor's Edge in college (I may have read it in high school too, but my experience of reading it in college led me to believe that I must have only skimmed the thing, or read only section of it, in high school English class), I hadn't gotten around to reading
Of Human Bondage until last month. It deserves its status as a classic, certainly. Do people still write books that follow a character for 23 contiguous years like this?
I've found it to be the case this semester, one of my classes (plot class) demanded, towards its end, some consideration of what it is exactly that I like in books, and one of the things that came up for me was my notion of "scope." Ranking what it is that I value in books, then, came out something like this:
1) Scope - reach, breadth, scale, etc.
2) Complexity - plot, sub-plots, complications, pattern
3) Structure - form, more pattern, the way the story is woven
And those things, combined with a sense of newness, equalled my sense of the ambitious, which ends up being perhaps the most important--the sense of the author's own ambition (this can, of course, be historically situated as well).
Michael
Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. I'm not sure why I didn't read this when it first came out; I thoroughly enjoyed
Chabon's other novels (well, not
Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but the other two), but yeah, this book is quite good. Certainly ambitious. I got pretty cynical towards
Chabon for a while in the mid-
oughts, mostly '
cuz of his association with
McSweeney's, but this book gets him back on my good side.
Oh well, and now I'm busy again trying to make this stupid
webpage. All for now.
Gingerbread faces: they're like gingerbread people, except you don't have any cookie cutters so you can cut them out with a table glass instead.
