Been away for awhile, overrun with studies—read a good deal of detective fiction, saw many a noir, read and reread Roland Barthes, Paul de Man and the likes. There was some Shakespeare in between. Now I'd like to get back here and keep steady.
So...
I'm two books deep in my winter reading:
The most strangely paced novel I've read. A near four-hundred pages of toil. When events begin to bubble up, you buckle down, expecting the arrival of a game-changing plot point. But Hamsun resists. He opts for a quietness that seems impossible to sustain. Yet you never want to set the book down. It's beautiful, and like the only other novel of his that I've read—
Mysteries—it's completely singular.
I've read Philip K. Dick before—he's so strange and hard to refuse. This is considered by Time Magazine to be one of the 100 greatest novels in the English Language. Pretty impressive. I can say this: you never know where he's taking you and you're never sure if things are as they seem. PKD's world is at once funny and scary—in Ubik, the living communicate with the dead (those suspended in half-life, a state between death and the great unknown), which is creepy, but his characters are also comically plagued by the money-grubbing gadgets of their time, never able to open doors in their own homes without paying up. Ubik is, simply put, a page-turner. Read it.
