Current Distractions, May 2013 Edition

At the beginning of this month, I said I'd write some longer Current Distractions posts. So here we are, and let me tell you, it's been a busy month. Sort of.

IRL-wise, I've been at home most of the month, although I did have to return to The North for one (hopefully) last tour. (That got me thinking about how badly I need to write a couple of different Supplemental posts, so hopefully I'll have those ready to go soon.)  Before my trip, some jerk was kind enough to smash one of the windows of my car for me. They didn't steal anything, which was almost more insulting than the alternative. So I've been feeling even more misanthropic than usual ever since, and it's not pretty.

Reading
The first Saturday of May is Free Comic Book Day, which I finally actually participated in for the first time this year. I bought volume 3 of Gabriel Rodriguez and Joe Hill's Locke and Key series, and got ten free comics!

But I haven't read them yet

I've since read the Locke and Key book, and enjoyed it a lot. I still find this medium confusing and hard to appreciate a lot of the time, but this series is pleasantly creepy, and I think that the characters are great. And I don't know anything about art, but I think Rodriguez does a great job.

I also read the fourth book in the Dark Tower series, called Wizard and Glass. People seem to have varying opinions on this book, but I thought it was pretty good but didn't enjoy it as much as the earlier books in the series. The pacing is slightly off and it kind of drags in the middle. Still, the witch Rhea is spectacularly disgusting (she licks her cat[!!!!!]), no one can write adolescence like Stephen King, and the whole book is a great bit of backstory that establishes the character of the Gunslinger a lot more firmly. (NB: I did review The Gunslinger, I just haven't gotten to it in the posting order yet, obviously.)

Currently I have a romance novel on the go (The Thorn Birds), which I'll be reviewing "formally," and a non-fiction book about scientific progress (The Beginning of Infinity), which I'll have more details about next month, most likely.

Watching
I've gotten into How I Met Your Mother lately in a big way. I don't know exactly how much of it I watched in May and how much I watched in April, but basically I reached the end of season 7. So now suddenly I have to avoid spoilers for who the mother Ted met at the end of season 8 is. Grr.

I wasn't organized enough to finish rewatching Arrested Development before the new season, so I haven't seen it, but I will soon!

And finally, I saw Star Trek: Into Darkness. I'm one of the apparently rare people who thought that Star Trek 2009 was pretty great, with some exceptions (Winona Ryder, Kirk getting command of the Enterprise after about three years as a Starfleet cadet and a day or two of command experience). But ST:ID was 75% of a great movie and 25% of a terrible one, which resulted in 100% meh. As a Trek fan, I'm pretty disappointed, while at the same time conceding that I dislike pretty much all of the other Star Trek movies, so it isn't actually that important. It's a franchise that belongs on tv, and will hopefully return there soon.

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I hope everyone out there had a nice month of May!  Here are some flowers.

72. A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: A man buys a house and then dies.

Year Published: 1961
Pages: 623
First Sentence: Ten weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I think it's the prologue, rather than "the book proper," that reveals that Mr Biswas will someday have a house. Born into poverty on an estate in Trinidad, but a transplanted Hindu Brahmin (I only partly understand how the whole of that works, alas), he gradually works his way up to the position of newspaper reporter for one of the country's biggest papers. He also marries and has children. A million things happen. The book is his life story, all of his desire for a house to make his own. It's also about a similar evolution of Trinidad itself.

Because of that, the book reminded me a lot of Midnight's Children. I hope that's not just a case of racism on my part (brown people, woo!), but the two are really thematically similar as far as I'm concerned. The life story of a man, symbolic of a country's development and growth. Midnight's Children is the newer one of the two, and I'm not sure whether Rushdie was inspired by Naipaul at all.

A House for Mr Biswas is no Midnight's Children, that's for sure (but at least it's better than A Bend in the River). It's not as funny or as beautiful to read. It's well-written, and Naipaul obviously has wisdom and insight, but the whole thing is just really grim and endless. The characters are pretty decent, except for Mr Biswas himself. He's obviously the one who we spend the most time with, and so this is definitely not a good thing. I feel like this book is a look at what happens when the whiny male characters like Augie March and Stingo live in mud houses.

Basically what I'm saying is that I didn't care about Mr Biswas. (As an aside, Naipaul made the interesting choice of primarily referring to the main character as "Mr Biswas" throughout the entire book, even when he's a child. Others call him by his first name of Mohun, but the overriding name is Mr Biswas. Never just Biswas by itself, either.)

If I may get even more blunt, I don't think I was ever going to care about Mr Biswas. If not for The List, I never would've read a second one of Naipaul's books, or probably a first, for that matter. I'm sure that post-colonial narratives written by non-white people are a valuable thing to read, but this particular author leaves me cold. The book does explore or allude to some interesting concepts, like the communal life of the Tulsi family Mr Biswas' wife belongs to, the different languages spoken among different people, etc. But overall the book just dragged, and I'm glad I don't have to read any more of Naipaul's work.

- - - - -

Lakhan the carter said, "But this is a fine man. He doesn't seem to care whether his son is drowned or not."
"How do you know what he thinks?" Bipti said.
"Leave him, leave him," Raghu said, in an injured, forgiving tone. "Mohun is my son. And if I don't care whether he is drowned or not, that is my business."

- - - - -

In Which I'm Lazy

I certainly hope that no one out there is under any illusion whatsoever that my job is blogging, which is to say that actually I have a full time job besides this blog, and, like anyone else's full time job, it takes up roughly 40% of my waking hours, not including my commute. I'm positive that I complain about this all the time, so I won't belabour the point too much.

Anyway, earlier this year I talked about how I wanted to 1) read more of the Top 100 books and 2) keep posting every two weeks.

Goal the First:

I totally jumped into more List books with both feet, and have so far read at least as many of them as I did last year. But my reading pace has been feeling increasingly frenetic and thus not very enjoyable, and while I'll definitely read more List books this year, I need to slow down. The last thing I want to do is finish this project and not want to read anymore, or something like that. I'm not trying to make it seem like reading a book and writing a few paragraphs about it is a lot of work or anything, but it's not no work, either.

Goal the Second:

It's been increasingly difficult posting every two weeks, possibly just due to what I got up to in April, but also because of how few List book reviews I have ready to go at any given time. What I'm trying really hard to avoid is a scenario where I haven't read anything from the List and go without posting for months on end.

So once again I'm cutting back services, but I think it'll be ok. Here's the plan:

1. More thorough Current Distractions posts. If I'm supposedly so busy, what exactly is it that I'm doing? The usual round-ups are a few paragraphs thrown together at the last minute, but it wouldn't be hard to do better than that.
   
2. One post per month. Either reviews or whatever else (I really need to post another Board Member Bio at some point, don't I?). I know this means that the actual percentage of content on the blog will decrease, and I hate it, but I think it'll be better in the long run.

Believe it or not, despite my whining, I do have quite a few reviews and other posts essentially ready to go. It's the Top 100 books that are holding me up, on an "as ever" sort of basis.