Darkmans, Nicola Barker

Mm.  I should know better than this.  When I read a review that says “to suggest that this dazzling, complex novel has anything quite as conventional as a plot would be misleading”, I should know that it just isn’t the book for me.  It just isn’t.  It just can’t be.  I need a plot.  I read books for the plots, and that is why I read.  And I do not tend to like books that mess with paragraphs and punctuation – I know that this is edgy but it always ends up feeling choppy and affected to me.  In this case, choppy and affected and tedious after the first few pages.  What is wrong with normal punctuation, I should like to know?

Unfortunately, I had jury duty day before yesterday, and I was stuck with reading it because although we were waiting in a library (thank you, kindly courts), I didn’t want to get up to look for another book, because I didn’t want anyone to take my seat.  So I did stuff for work until my laptop battery died, and then I worked on some work on paper, and then when I had run out of things I could do without a laptop, I read this book.  Up to page 366.  I didn’t like it that much.  Up with normal punctuation!  Hurrah for punctuation!

Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth

This book and I got off to a rocky start. Last time I was at the library, I picked up a bunch of books that I thought might be good, by authors who are all those weird fantasy realists and postmodern and metafictiony. I got the rest of Salman Rushdie’s books that I haven’t read – except, annoyingly enough, The Satanic Verses, which is the one I wanted to read first because I was pretty sure I was going to like it the least – and I got several books by Italo Calvino, and I got Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth. (And Invitation to a Beheading, which is neither here nor there.) So I asked my sister what I wanted to read, The Baron in the Trees or Shalimar the Clown or Giles Goat-Boy, and she thought Giles Goat-Boy was a sweet little children’s story so she said to read that one so I did.

I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but it’s about a kid who’s raised as a goat, and the university is the universe; so there you have the central conceits. There are a lot of things like the Second Campus Riot and then the west side of campus and the east side of campus had the Quiet Riot and like – okay, whatever, I will admit that the long segment of world history refigured for a university became a little trying (I guess if I’d thought it was funny, it might have been better), and the I-am-a-goat bits irritated me. I kept having to put the book down and have a brief silent soliloquoy about Why, why, why, why? which is how I sometimes feel about postmodern things. This book is damn weird, and I didn’t like it at all, so I set myself a goal: Read until chapter four of the second section, and then you can quit. After I decided that, I had a dream in which I was in jail for something, and they took us on a field trip to the bookshop, but they wouldn’t let me look at any of the good books. I could only look at the lame books. And inside my head I was thinking I will not let them break my spirit!

I was very, very close to abandoning the entire enterprise. But I sensibly consulted The Internet, and The Internet assured me that I was quite right. Giles Goat-Boy does get off to a weird start, and the university-history thing is dated and weird. The Internet also told me that The Sot-Weed Factor might be more my thing, and that John Barth, in spite of all his weirdness, does some damn good storytelling. And I am all about plot. I know a lot of people just rejoice in the joyous joys of writing, and I do too, but honestly, if there’s not a good plot there, and if it’s not being advanced well, it’s just no good. That was why (I know it’s not the generally-held opinion) I like The Ground Beneath Her Feet so much better than Midnight’s Children, which was a very cool idea and a beautifully written book but sort of carried the plot along in fits and starts. Whereas The Ground Beneath Her Feet goes steadily along, with things happening – love story, goats, photography, and all the rest and so forth.

I really was determined to get to my chapter-four cutoff point, and the thing is, I just didn’t do it. After a while I tipped it off my bedside table in my sleep, and then I read Ender’s Shadow and Ender’s Game, and then I obtained from another library branch The Satanic Verses and read that, and then I wanted to read Walk Two Moons which I always see all over my house so I looked and looked and I couldn’t find it so instead of that I read Chasing Redbird and then I hunted for Walk Two Moons some more and the damn book was nowhere but I did find Back Home, which I’d been frantically hunting for after I read Good Night, Mr. Tom earlier this month, so I read that, and then my mother got Understanding the Borderline Mother, which my family’s been dying to read because we love reading about BPD, on PaperbackSwap, and I was halfway through that and I realized that there is just no part of me that even remotely wants to read Giles Goat-Boy.

So I stopped trying.

Oh well.

Saturday, by Ian McEwan

Okay, I didn’t pick this up wholly at random, but it was the only Ian McEwan book at the library although I actually wanted Atonement to see how different it was to the movie, so that’s why I decided to read this one.  Anyway I didn’t finish.  I have a massive big stack of library books to read, and this one wasn’t impressing me at all, and I was way way in and still waiting for something to happen, and I hate those books where a dude wakes up in the morning and starts to think all about his entire life in massive detail, so I was like, Well, shit, life’s too short, I’m going to read something that I find interesting or well-written.

But maybe I was just in the wrong mood for this book.  So perhaps I’ll try it again someday (probably not though).  Definitely I will try another Ian McEwan book sometime – I hate it when someone’s a highly acclaimed writer who has written a number of books and I really, really, really want to love them because that would be exciting and open up new vistas of joy for me but then I hate their books.  That’s why I never read Joyce Carol Oates, because I’m afraid of that very thing happening.