Monk

Having finished my exegetical book on Orwell, I began my next daytime book: "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" by Rebecca Goldstein. It's a novel, but I put it in my 'serious' stack, the 'literature' shelf at GoodReads, because it did not look exactly like a page-turner. It's a bit serious in the way of fiction, I think.

But here is the thing, I am rather enjoying it. It is not a page-turner, and I am fairly over my enthusiasm for the God question, but I am thinking that this could work for my nighttime reading, that I could readily stretch myself a little and make it work. It would be nice to channel all my fiction into my bedtime reading, while keeping the days for the non-fiction. It would be a good division of labor.

However, although it would be nice to beef up the reading life, I am inclined to stick with the trash fiction for the nighttime - the detective stories, the Koontz and King stories, and, yes, the schoolgirl-in-distress stories, the quasi-porn novels. When I wake up at three o'clock in the morning, unable to fall back asleep, and I decide to pick up my nighttime book in order to burn off a little excess energy, I need something that is not challenging in the least for my befogged, zombie-like brain; I need a quick, straight drop into a fantasy world that I want to get lost inside of - a hot shot of heroin-fiction to get me through a tough time.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that it feels too sugary and hollow to be working two novels at the same time, even if one of them is somewhat more serious and requires a bit more attention. I will probably continue debating this issue for a while. It is the kind of problem I don't mind living with.

“From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”

-- Charles Dickens, upon concluding his final public reading

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.”

-- Burial service

I am just about done with Claire Tomalin’s “Charles Dickens: A Life”. This morning during my walk to the duck pond, I read of his final days and was naturally moved. Before I chose this biography, I was struggling over whether I should get another one, instead of this newest take on the life, but I am glad that I bet on Ms. Tomalin.

She told the tale straightforwardly, from the beginning of the life to the end, and she spent some pleasant time on the favorite works. She also did not shy from the shadowy side of the life, about how this champion of the poor and downtrodden could be a little cold toward his own numerous sons, and you see how much he would have appreciated the advent of birth control. And then in his older age, he was not able to rise above the temptation that is often afforded to a highly successful older man: one more plunge into the joys of young love. What man can begrudge him this? though it did mean shoving aside his wife. But what a life, rising from child labor to become one of the immortal voices of literature! The Elvis of nineteenth-century literature.

I am thinking that “Oliver Twist” might be my next Dickens book. Although I read that one in my college days, it will be like reading it for the first time, for all that my memory has kept. Or maybe I’ll take my first crack at “The Curiosity Shop”. I have some time to decide. I am going to take a little break from Dickens for now.

What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

It’s rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.

-- Ira Glass at The New York Times

It really makes him want to puke? I would think that pedophilia might make him want to puke, but not calling detective fiction a guilty pleasure. Maybe the problem is that he does not care to read fiction in the first place. For people whose reading range runs the gamut, I think it is useful to have a 'guilty pleasures' list.

In fact, I have recently rearranged my routine to give 'guilty pleasure' reading its own little time slot. It happened when I got my biography on Charles Dickens. Although Tomalin's book is great and easy to read, I have come back to the realization that my mind is not up to reading anything even moderately serious and substantive late in the evening. So, I decided to adjust my daily routine, and that my bedtime reading would now be my time for reading page-turning fiction, stuff like Stephen King and detective fiction, and even porn fiction, provided that it has a little heft in terms of characters and storyline since we are not looking for a wank but a fun read.

Indeed, speaking of pedophilia, after finishing Marcus Heller's "Rape", I have begun a squalidly dark novel about the back-alley world of child sex slavery and snuff films: "Tell Me That You Like It" by Terre J. Sadler. I suspect that Mr. Glass would have no interest in reading these books, and they might even make him puke, but that is why they are a guilty pleasure. After this one, I may take on Bruce Wagner's "Dead Stars", or maybe Stephen King's "It", to step away from the nasty sex for a little while. The only problem with making my 'guilty reading' my bedtime reading is that it makes me want to stay up later, and I dreadfully need my night's sleep. But this has just about become my favorite time of the day. I love settling into my page-turner with nothing else to do in the day except go to bed.

Stomach-turning, sick-making, rancid, repugnant, repellent, squalid, odious, fetid, disgusting — there is a thesaurus full of terms to describe the contents of Bruce Wagner’s willfully offensive new novel, “Dead Stars.” Photos of dead babies; paparazzi in search of crotch shots of child celebrities; Internet posts celebrating an actor’s getting cancer; violent, graphic group sex; parents pimping out their children — one repulsive scene follows another in these pages, drowning the reader in a more- than-600-page-deep cesspool.

Mr. Wagner’s portraits of hustlers, hucksters, predators, celebrities, celebrity wannabes, reality TV stars, drug dealers and every sort of show business parasite imaginable are meant to create a lurid, collagelike picture of Hollywood as a sewer of depravity, narcissism and greed, and to use that Hollywood as a metaphor for an America obsessed with fame, addicted to voyeurism and circling the spiritual drain. In this 21st-century U.S. of A., girls want to grow up to be like the Kardashian sisters; pornographers aspire to Gagosian gallery shows; and boldface and designer brand names from the tabloids have become the cultural lingua franca. Self-promotion is the order of the day.

-- Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times

Mr. Kakutani ends up panning the book for being rather unredemptive, but I think it's safe to say that this is one for the 'guilty pleasures' list, maybe after I finish Marcus Van Heller's classic "Rape".

On one side you have the purists, those who think books are meant to be read on real paper made from real trees cut down by big burly men with beards. They speak of the smell of the book and the texture of delicately embossed covers.

On the other side you have early adopting gadget-a-holics. They're the folks who don't mind sacrificing a little bit of the romance of holding and smelling a book for the convenience of not hauling it around to the beach, airport or doctor’s office.

-- Jason F. Wright at The Desert News

I use to be a little loud in favor of the real paper and real trees, but this was before we got our first Kindle. I must blush. For me, not only are e-readers easy to handle, but they make book-blogging easier. I can even set the little rectangle Kindle next to my laptop to type something from it. With my poor eyes, it is also no small benefit to have easy control over the size of the print.

One disadvantage of e-readers: I don't like how I can no longer readily guage how many pages are left in a chapter or a section, or to be able to readily flip from one section to another. It may be that I am just not used to using the tools that presumably enable one to do this, but I don't seem to be getting used to using these tools.

Does this mean that I no longer really care about real books at all? Hardly. When it comes to a book that I know I am going to want to reread a number of times over the years, I definitely want a good old-fashioned hard copy. But let's face it: most books are one-time wonders, if I even care to finish reading them in the first place.

I looked for a nice book to read on the plane. I couldn't find one. What's up with that? There are nine trillion books in the world and I couldn't find a single one that I imagined would interest me for more than a paragraph. I blame the Internet.

I consume content on the Internet like an anteater with a vacuum attachment. I like my information in small bites, no fat. And skip the fiction, please. Reality is far more interesting than wading through six hundred pages of some ghost writer's imagined universe to figure out which imaginary character killed which other imaginary character. I want to read about Lady Gaga wearing a dress made out of a homeless guy's gutted carcass because she cares deeply about the economy. Can your crime novel give me that? I didn't think so.

-- Scott Adams

Scott may be a certified genius, as he often likes to point out, but he obviously is not a literary man. I don't think a summary paragraph could do "Paradise Lost" or the "Iliad" justice. The point is not so much what happens to imaginary characters, but in the way it is told, the way the narrative and the poetry pulls us into this conjured world, so that through well-drawn characters and narratives, we can live and struggle and love and die a thousand times within the safe comfort of our reading chair.

I can see how some people might not feel the magic of that, but not having much of a life of my own, I can hardly imagine the worth of this life without this literary dimension of experiencing. And surely I was not fully alive before finally getting to Nabokov's "Lolita".

Very often I fall asleep while reading. I never seem to be able to decide that I'm done…I just like to keep reading until my body decides for me. More often than not, my husband will turn off my light and take away the book.

-- Jennifer Egan

That's not something I can do, since I ordinarily read standing up and pacing about, being something of an active reader. I suppose I know I've had enough when I start to get wobbly. And I pretty much look to be done by midnight anyway, because I want to give myself a good shot at enjoying a seven-hour sleep.

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called "Web logs," cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club.

-- Steven Johnson for The Wall Street Journal

I suppose there could be some fun aspects in the new world of e-books, but I hope it will be only an extra option for our reading experience. I feel locked in to the old world of solitary thought between one reader and his book. For me, reading a book is tantamount to a religious meditation. It feels like quality time with the power of the word. I love the speed and hyper-communicativeness of the Internet, but in the end, it strikes me as being crassly utilitarian - more about skimming and clicking than deep thinking, and more about socializing than making one's peace with God, so to speak.

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
It's very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God's grace.

-- Inferno by Dante Alighieri as translated by John Ciardi

Part of the happy fallout from reading "Gargoyle" is that I've picked Dante back up. Although I originally found "Inferno" to be fascinating enough in my younger days, it didn't really capture my fancies enough for me to think of it as a personal favorite and a rereadable of mine. But I'm enjoying it much more now. I think it helps if you don't let yourself get bogged down too much by all the footnotes and obscure references that are so personal to Dante, and to just let yourself enjoy the atmospherics.

I never followed Dante beyond Hell before, but I think I will let him take me for the whole trip through Purgatory and Paradise this time as well. Shakespeare could use some time off.

"Illinois is now justly regarded as the central battleground, or turning-point," not just for Lincoln and Douglas, but for "the powers of slavery and the hosts of Freedom," and "the pending contest in this State" will likely settle the next Presidency." And the debates had become "the greatest assizes that were ever assembled at any time ... for the life of the nation, for the liberty of a race, for the triumph of eternal principles."

-- "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America" by Allen C. Guelzo

Another great read. This is also an excellent volume for those who feel a little interested in Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War but have not felt comfortable diving into that vast sea of materials yet, as this makes for a good general reader-friendly introduction, being simple, clear, and definitely not academic-boring. Although the debates are at the focus, Mr. Guelzo covers the whole campaign, including all the party and intra-party rivalries that give the prose more of a dramatic edge, in addition to the fact that we are talking about a democratic conflict over race and slavery.

For me personally, this makes a good front piece for the little Lincoln epic I have been developing over the years. The next book is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals", though only the first part, which covers the 1860 election and the personal background of Lincoln and the key members of his cabinet. The rest of her book is fine; it's just that when it comes to the Civil War itself, I'm ready to switch gears to Shelby Foote's classic trilogy. And giving a little depth to that trilogy, while reading into it for my weekday reading, I would turn my weekend reading over to Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic, "Uncle Tom's Cabin". After the trilogy, I go to Edward Steers' "Blood on the Moon" on the assassination of Lincoln.

As if that were not enough, I recently discovered on C-SPAN another book that must be added, Stephen Budiansky's "The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox", which promises to cover the Reconstruction and how the South tended to win the peace through treachery and terror.

Lincoln has become one of my objects of fascination, rather like Elvis and Shakespeare. An odd assortment of interests but there you go.