Author: Ian

Stack of Books Update

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In honor of a new year (and my finally remembering to start writing 2017 for the date) it’s time to post an update on my reading progress, since that’s part of the reason I started doing this in the first place.

Since I started keeping track last April, I’ve read 20 books, which is WAY more than I read over the same timeframe in 2015.  Two of those books had been sitting in the stack next to my bed for three years, and one (The Epic of Gilgamesh) had been there for four.  That feels pretty good. Continue reading »

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

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The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

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Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

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Amaterasu, Baal, and ten other gods from world mythology get reincarnated every ninety years; this time they’re taking the form of teenage pop stars and a little bit of hell breaks loose when Lucifer goes rogue.  The premise promises lots of action, and I loved artist Jamie McKelvie’s style, particularly the splash pages, where there’s always something to look at.  The collection also comes with variant covers and apocrypha that form the graphic novel equivalent of a DVD bonus menu.  Reading more chapters feels necessary to make a more concrete judgement, but I’m definitely liking the start.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 2).

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Kieron Gillen’s Tumblr

Jamie McKelvie’s website

Paul Hanson Clark Interview Part II: Cookies, Capitalist Voodoo, and the Work-Art Balance

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This is Part 2 of my interview with poet, artist, and part-time cookiemaker Paul Hanson Clark, so you can check out Part 1 here.

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So to make your life work and still do your art, you have to go to your web editing job during the day and make the doughs in the afternoon. Continue reading »

Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger (1990)

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I have zero interest in football, but I enjoyed Bissinger’s book because it’s mostly about the all-encompassing influence that football holds over midwestern culture.  Bissinger spent a year in the west Texas town of Odessa following its high school football team to the state championship, and shows how completely football trumps academics and leads the town to build a $5.6 million stadium for its high school.  He also discusses how racial tensions and Reagan-era politics affected the region—history seen from ground level.

There’s a lot of football play-by-plays too, but I kind of skimmed over those.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online a few weeks ago, part of the research process for my new novel.

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Bissinger reflects on Friday Night Lights 25 years later (Sports Illustrated)

Interview with Bissinger on the book’s 25th anniversary (NPR)

Paul Hanson Clark Interview Part I: Sleep, The Creative Process, and Staying Organized

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Paul Hanson Clark is a poet, visual artist, and occasional musician heavily involved in the local poetry and art scenes in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska.  Until recently he worked two jobs: mornings in an office doing web design and afternoons mixing dough for a cookie shop (more about this in Part 2!), though he went on to leave the cookie shop job several weeks after our interview.

We sat on the floor of his living room—a large, carpeted room with no furniture and walls hung with his drawings and paintings—to talk about structuring your time and keeping organized. Continue reading »

Conversations with Kingsley Amis, by Thomas DePietro (2009)

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DePietro’s collection covers forty years of interviews with British novelist and man of letters Kingsley Amis, who has a lot to say on the writing process, British politics, and the working-class hero in post-WWII fiction as he moves from card-carrying Communist party member to hardcore Thatcher supporter over the course of forty years.  The collection also serves as a useful, expedited autobiography of Amis’s life (with his philandering only alluded to), but can be repetitive since Amis retells the same anecdotes over and over—how many times can we hear him deny being one of the Angry Young Men?

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online a few weeks ago as part of research for the new novel.

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1975 Interview with Amis for the Paris Review

Or, check out Amis’s first and most famous novel Lucky Jim instead

 

How to Show People You’re Serious About Your Creative Work

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A couple years ago, I had a Day Job where sometimes I had to go to parties with my coworkers and other people involved with where I worked.  These parties were usually pretty awkward because I was the youngest one there and didn’t have much in common with the people around me.

At one of them, though, I met a guy a few years older than me who was pretty interesting, and I told him that I’d lived in Japan and was working on a novel about the lives of foreigners there. Continue reading »

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925)

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I found Mrs. Dalloway more accessible than other Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read, possibly because it’s also shorter.  The stream-of-consciousness novel shows a day in the life of a fiftysomething socialite reflecting on the mundanity of her married life, the passionate love of her youth, and her deeply hidden feelings for a female friend.  My favorite scenes, though, were the surreal and hard-hitting takes on WWI shell shock in the hallucinatory ramblings of ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith.

There’s a lot to like here, but it’s still high modernism and can get…dense.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

From a grad school friend who had two copies, Summer 2015.

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Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer (essay)

How Much Time Do You Spend Commuting???

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I used to commute.  A lot.

Back when I started my first office job, I was driving 23 miles to work and back, which took 35 minutes AND since I used a busy commuter route I had to get to work 20 minutes early or waste even more time sitting in traffic.  I listened to a lot of music during that time, though, to the point where I still to this day associate certain parts of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming album with that drive. Continue reading »