In Which A Mission Is Modified

I'd originally planned to post this at some point in the first half of January, but sort of ran out of time. I'm going to be trying to pay more attention to the blog again starting... NOW!

The "Classic" reviews are finally all done, so I know you're all dying to find out what happens next. Am I going to get off my lazy ass and start reviewing some romnovs again, or am I going to be a big baby and cease and desist?

The short answer to that question is that yes, I am going to start up the romnov side of the project again. However, it's going to look a lot different.

The logistics are basically that the category romance novels are only going to make up four out of every ten of what I'm going to call "the R books." There are a vast number of reasons for this, but I'm going to give you two of them.

First, although I've concluded that I'm not doing anything wrong by approaching these books with an eye for snark, I do want to start being a lot more careful about it. And when I say "careful," I mean that I need to make a better case for how awful these things tend to be, using examples from the text and so on, in an effort to give due respect to the creators. I hope that doesn't sound overly lame.

Second, not only do I have better things to do with my time than writing romnovs, I have better things to do than reading them. When I started the project I was an unemployed loser with lots of time to waste on this sort of thing i.e. reading novels that I would otherwise avoid at all costs. If at some point I fit that description again, I'll certainly increase the proportion of romnovs included in the R books. Now, however, I have a full time (and potentially full time PLUS) job, and I just can't do that.

Therefore, the rest of the R books (in each set of ten) will now consist of:

• 1 old romance novel
• 1 new, non-category romance novel
• 4 random novels because My Reading List Is Too Damn Long

Lest you think I'm being too dismissive about this, please don't! Even though I don't really have time to give this post the attention it deserves (whereas I honestly spent an entire day on the one that started it all), I've really spent tons of time thinking about this over the past several months.

Also note, with regard to My Reading List being Too Damn Long, I'm also going to take the liberty of reading some non-fiction. None of that will be making its way into the list of R books, but I may mention it from time to time, in supplementals. This might also be a good time to mention that while this is unquestionably a litblog, I consider things like relationships, gender, and the engineering profession to be relevant secondary topics, and my ponderings on those things will probably show up from time to time.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that right now, I just can't stick to a standard schedule when it comes to the reviews. As I've hinted at a bit, A Bend in the River took ages to read, and the next couple books are over 500 pages long (not astronomical by any means, but still a bit on the long side to finish in one month in addition to everything else I'm doing). I'm going to do my best to post something every ten days or so, but I just can't manage the reviews. My endless apologies, yet again.

Anyway, for the moment, since I haven't read any romnovs recently and I'd really like to finish out this set of ten with just random stuff, I'm going to post the two reviews that I'd written before the fiasco as the next two R books. The first of these should be going up within the next few days, possibly with some further commentary from me. The "old romance novel" for this set of R books is a French novel that I read in translation. It counts because one of the books on The List, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, is actually a translation from German. And I still haven't started reading Angle of Repose.

In Which UGH

Hey everyone, sorry about the lack of postage yesterday and today and for the foreseeable future.  I'll hopefully have an announcement coming up around Friday sometime, but here's the deal basically:

1. I'm an internet addict, and trying to quit (ish).
2. A Bend in the River seems to have sapped all of my enthusiasm for the project.

Seriously I should change its rating to a 0/3, because I've read four other books since I finished it at the end of last month, and I still don't even want to think about reading anything but sf&f ever again.  I'm pretty sure that no other book has ever had that kind of negative effect on me.  I mean, for all I know, Angle of Repose could be my new favourite book, but I'm just not interested at all.

Back to work soon, I promise.

83. A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: A man suffers from existential angst.

Year Published: 1979
Pages: 287
First Sentence: The World is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Rating: 1/3 (don't bother)

Review:
Africa is one of my biggest blind spots. Of all the tiny bits of world history that I know and can cobble together to form a picture of the whole, there's a huge blank between Egypt and South Africa. If you were to take a magnifying glass to examine that blank, you would see only a few microscopic specks: Black Hawk Down, Hotel Rwanda, fossilized footprints, a single black and white photo representing the Boer War, and, finally, the image from the 1940 Warner Bros cartoon "Africa Squeaks" of dark, darker, darkest Africa. (NB that I have absolutely no idea when I would've seen that cartoon, since I can't even find it on the internet right now, but it may have been the 1992 colourized and heavily censored version. My family didn't have cable, but my babysitter did, so if I saw it anywhere, it was probably there.)

This gap is obviously something that really needs to be remedied, and probably not just for me. But where Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One gave me an appetite for Africa, A Bend in the River made me lose it.

And yeah, no more metaphors now.

I really did not like this book at all. Just at the point when I should've been getting into it, I was wishing it was over. I'm afraid the summary is going to reveal how little attention I bothered to pay to this book.

The story is Salim's (not Saleem's though, unfortunately). His family, Muslim Indian transplants on the east coast of Africa, have made the continent their home for centuries. When colonialism starts to, for lack of a better word, dissipate, Salim knows that things are going to get desperate, so he buys a store in the heart of the continent from a family friend named Nazruddin. I'd name drop some countries, but unfortunately Naipaul doesn't name any names. Colonials have already been driven out of the town where Salim's store is located, and he and all the other local non-Africans begin to pick up the pieces, while the Africans in the villages around them begin to adapt to the new domestic rule and the continent's changing place in the modern world.

This is actually a pretty interesting premise. In retrospect, more than anything else, it makes me curious about an alternate history of North America involving Vikings, the Chinese, and the forceful ejection of French and English settlers. But that's just the weird way my brain works. (And after reading the first volume of Company of Adventurers, I must say I'm surprised that the continent itself didn't manage to "forcefully eject" those wimps.) But the idea is interesting in its own setting, too. However, while Naipaul does very gently brush the surface of some of this, it was through the eyes of a character that I didn't care about at all.

While he didn't inspire the hatred that Sebastian Dangerfield did, Salim was certainly no match for Saleem. And whereas Loving was probably about as boring as A Bend in the River, Naipaul is far inferior to Green when it comes to characterization. I found both the style and the story here incredibly tedious. Everybody is forever giving grandiose speeches, and it grates. I think it's probably obvious by now that I favour simple or at least straightforward language, and Naipaul's style was rarely either one of those things.

A House for Mr. Biswas, another of Naipaul's books, is at 72 on The List, and I seriously hope that that one is better than this one.

- - - - -

I didn't want to go back. Not the first time. I didn't think my heart could stand it. But the aeroplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The aeroplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much.

- - - - -

With each job description I read I felt a tightening of what I must call my soul. I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives that other people have laid out for them.

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