buter's BABY blog

I was going to write something pithy and witty about how amused I was to hear about the impact that America's latest legislation had on college students. You know the story, they legislated to make sending money to offshore online casinos illegal, and now all these college students have to stop getting addicted to gambling and invest their hard-earned dollars (earned selling burgers, or whatever, to slightly richer college students, I guess) in more salubrious pursuits. Like drugs, or pornography, or file sharing, or whatever it is passes for fun these days.

But, instead I'd rather write about a book. Not just any book. A book my father read to me and his father ... waaait a second, that's a different book.

Someone told me recently that if I was looking for tomes, I should try my hand at the Great Amurrican Novel genre. I'd just read The Great Gatsby for the first time ever, so obviously I thought I knew it all. But anyway. He recommended Underworld ... yeeeaahhhh ... we have that. D™ and I have both tried to read it several times, and neither of us can get past the decades-long description of the baseball game at the start. It would be ironic if the whole book is all about the baseball game. We must just not have enough cultural similarities to "get it". When this friend went on to suggest The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, I thought ... hmm, if this is another so-called Great Amurrican Novel I'm gonna read it in Borders before I invest in it.

So the next time I went to Borders I looked for this Franzen fellow - he was there, all right, but no Corrections in sight. A couple of other random things were there, but I settled for Proust instead. You can't go wrong with a bit of Proust. That's pretty hard going though, sometimes I have the distinct impression that I'm swimming through rapidly setting jelly trying to get from one end of a sentence to the other. As soon as you lean one way you're totally off course and you have no idea where you started or where you'll end up. But, a great sense of achievement from just setting off though. Alain de Botton said, Proust will change your life - I'm coming to believe that. Even if you don't follow it all the way, just the exercise of paying attention to the descriptions will enrich your daily habitation. Proust can spend several pages describing the memory that the taste of tea-cake inspires in our hero. When I put the book down, I had the distinct feeling that I should be paying more attention to things that we normally just don't notice. The feeling you get from the first sip of tea in the morning. The sense of calm when the hot water in the shower first cascades over you. That impossible moment just before you open your eyes on a Sunday morning with the birds singing and the sun shining in the curtains. Even to exploring the feeling of not being able to remember something ... until it suddenly pops out at you. Case in point: Depeche Mode! I've been trying to remember that for hours!

And then .. I picked up a copy of The Corrections for cheap at the local book clearance. It's much easier going than Underworld. Franzen's sentence structure does tend towards the Proustian .. in that the sentences can go on forever, but he is poking fun at himself when he does it. Almost as if he is saying to himself "let's see how long I can carry this sentence on for without losing the thread." It's quite highly amusing to read about losing one's way in the middle of a sentence, likening Alfred's wandering mind to the sentence describing the wandering mind .. or something like that. The book is also not easy going, but I think it does deserve the term "Pretty good so far Amurrican Novel".

And coming from me, the book snob of the family, I think that's pretty high praise ... though it's still not as good as Quicksilver though (so far).