I was open to anything and the most important thing was to keep finding more. At the end of one summer, in the twilight of the CD era, my friend and I took a trip to Vancouver. While we were there we bought, between the two of us, somewhere around 50 CDs. The height of the mania.
Then, in my mid twenties, this obsession dropped off. I became more selective, I could dismiss bands by the way they looked in a single magazine photo. I had found my niche, which I suppose is inevitable when you really care about something. It's too bad though. I wish I could be open to, and care about music, the way I once did. These days I struggle to listen to a couple new albums a year.
A little while after the music fixation died, books came to take their place. In a fiction course at university we had a reading list of a dozen novels. Upon completion, at least half of them became, temporarily, the Greatest Book I’d Ever Read. It was that same lightning feeling brought on by music years before and it was a great place to be.
Books continued like this for the next six or seven years. I was always claiming a new book as my favourite ever. But in the past year and a half, that has started to wane as well. I've become selective. I don’t like it, but I can’t help it. The tastes are maturing.
But being selective doesn’t mean letting it die. It takes more effort, but some books are still amazing. Part of that effort is being more ok with abandoning books, I do it way more than I used to, but life’s too short. It’s also helped in making me a more careful reader. I need to be able to justify why I can't finish a book, often I’ll take notes on what went wrong, this exercise can be as helpful as finishing a good book.
So here are some recent notes from finished and unfinished books, some of them five out of tens, but we know they can’t all be Tens.
1) Norm Macdonald -- Based On A True Story
Sue got me this book for Christmas and I was thrilled. I was a latecomer to appreciating Norm’s brilliance. (Prerequisites for appreciation — white guy, 30-60, being Canadian doesn’t hurt.) The book, much like its author, was often frustrating. Every true anecdote was surrounded by miles of superfluous storytelling, searching for laughs that were only sometimes found. (Side note: funny books are a dubious enterprise. Have you ever laughed at a book the way you’ve laughed at a really good SNL sketch?) But because I'm a fan of Norm, I stuck it out. I had a hunch that his ending would provide closure and real feeling. It did. It was beautiful and unlike anything else I’ve read in the genre. It’s clear he put a lot of effort into the book. Still, unless you've watched at least one hundred hours of Norm on Youtube, stay away.
2) Ernest Becker -- The Denial Of Death
The Denial Of Death is not a fun book, I only made it to page 37. The introduction contains insights into how we're haunted by our mortality. But then it takes a disturbing turn into Freudian psychology. (Pretty sure disturbing is the only turn you take into Freud.) I'm talking the incestuous stuff, the fascination with shit stuff. I've always given those theories a wide berth, most people do, it's too much. When I reached the subheading "The Castration Complex," I was just about over it. Then I thought maybe I could keep reading if I skipped ahead to the next section, when I turned the page I found the subheading "Penis Envy." That was enough.
3) Animal Farm -- George Orwell
This is a book often mentioned on the tarmac at Air Canada. There's an employee in Halifax who escaped from Cuba a while back, for him, the story is quite meaningful, as it is for anyone who's read it. Still, none of the rest of us have gone on the lam from a dictator, so I'll give him this one. Animal Farm is good, fantastic even. There are absolutely no frills, not one extra sentence. But I couldn’t finish it.
I didn't put it down because it was a waste of time or because it was poorly written. I ditched it because I'm so worn out by politics I can't be bothered. Something that struck me about the book — or perhaps it was just a symptom of the political burnout — was how confused I was. For most of the book (I made it to about half) I was unsure about who was good and who was bad. Was Snowball bad? Or was it Napoleon? Did farmer Jones get a raw deal? Is Boxer the hard working horse good, or is he too naive to be assigned hero status. I have a feeling things get clearer towards the end, especially with Boxer the horse. He can't sustain those levels of exertion can he? When I left he was pulling early solo shifts hauling rocks up a hill.
ANYWAY, confusion, that's mostly what it was. It wasn't until Napoleon was sleeping in the house and walking around with an entourage of vicious guard dogs that I thought "hmmm, maybe Napoleon is part of the problem here." Even then, walking around with killer guard dogs would be kind of sweet. Long story short, if you have dictatorial ambitions, find a bunch of people like me and you'll likely go far.
4) Welcome To Paradise, Now Go To Hell -- Chas Smith
Welcome To Paradise is the story of surfing's underbelly on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii -- the crime and drugs woven into the sport's biggest stage. The more I know about surfing, which is still very little, the more I find that the sport, at least its culture, is pretty much all underbelly. There's no belly, and if there is, it's the fake abs of a halloween superhero costume.
With many apologies to my good friend Luke who bought me this for my birthday, I couldn't make it past page five, at least not right now. In truth, it was over after the first sentence, which is this: "There's a gun pressed to my temple."
Starting your story with a gun pressed to your temple is a little "on the nose" for me. Put it this way, if somebody ever started telling you a story in real life, and it began with, "so there's a gun pressed to my temple," how would you react? The proper reaction, in my mind, would be some variation of, “HA!"
Too much, Chas. At least buy me dinner before you threaten to blow my brains out.
5) In Search Of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
Ah yes, the real reason I wrote this, to talk about my high-minded, ambitious, literary endeavours! I first heard of Proust, through the movie Little Miss Sunshine where Steve Carell's character is the world's number two Proust scholar (I think). At the time, I actually thought that Proust was just somebody they made up for the sake of the movie. (Aaron, you were once so ignorant. You're now so learned.) In recent years I found out that a) Proust was a real person and b) is probably somebody worth looking into.
So far, 59 pages in, it's been great. I was worried it would be dense, it is, but not horribly so. More rich than dense.
It begins with a bittersweet account of a child (Proust) needing to be kissed goodnight by his mother before he goes to sleep. 59 pages of goodnight kiss analysis ... more captivating than it sounds.
Perhaps what's drawn me in most though is the sweet, barren honesty of the tale, I know it can't sustain, this child will grow up, but I'm a sucker for tenderness, especially in the dark days of winter in our Animal Farm world. The best part of my midwinter Proust oasis? This story is 8 volumes totalling 4,215 pages, I won’t finish it all, but it’s there in case of emergency.