Mapping It Out, Sort Of

I didn't do any justice at all last night to Powers, the story I was thinking about reading ahead of going to sleep. Fortunately I made up for that this morning with a focused reading that opened up the story to me as surely as its predecessor. I am now a confirmed Alice Munro fanboy. There is something quite remarkable going on in her fiction, sober and restrained as that remarkable thing is. I think it's something to do with the sense of openness she creates: you really don't know where the stories are heading, in the same arbitrary way life has.

Now I've finished Runaway I'm thinking of where my reading is heading to next. There's a certain random quality about the choices I make that seems to work but is less than reassuringly serious. But then I've never been a serious reader in any serious sense, I'm pleased to say.

It looks like the next few novels I'll be reading will be based on the fact I came away from a sale at the old second-hand bookstore at Holland Village - the one that closed down, but then reopened briefly to sell off old stock - with no fewer than six books at ridiculously low prices ($20 for the lot.) I gleefully grabbed stuff by Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Frayn, Anita Shreeve and Reginald Hill, hoping to get back up to speed, in every sense, in terms of the fiction that sort of straddles the line between worthiness and straightforward entertainment. The fact that I found it impossible not to purchase my little cache solely on the grounds of how cheap it all was points to a major deficiency of character, but since this is a deficiency with which I am more than familiar I feel I can let it pass without becoming overly concerned.

I also bought a biography of Camus the other day, and The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell after the Missus told me to go across the road into Kinokuniya whilst she was buying some Raya gifts at Orchard Road. These weren't cheap but having purchased the six books I mentioned above I seem to have no resistance to general book-buying. The idea of getting hold of some kind of e-reader thingummy has now been all but officially abandoned, though it just might re-surface when I discover there's no place to squirrel away my recent purchases. (My current plan is to off-load items that I'm never going to re-visit but which might have some appeal to someone, somewhere.)

I'm also on-going with a Selected Poems of W.H. Auden, one of two 'selecteds' I've got of a poet who I find is either utterly on the nose, or terribly turgid. I've just waded my way through the sonnets grouped together under The Quest, from the early 40s which I'd previously thought of as turgid Auden. This reading did nothing to alter that opinion. Mind you, I tend to favour later Auden so there's plenty to look forward to on that front.

Finally I suppose I should mention that I'm showing incredible restraint in not succumbing to the on-line purchase of the three collections of Vonnegut novels in the Library of America edition, plus the Dashiell Hammett volumes, plus the collection of Pound's poetry under the same aegis. How long this resistance will last is uncertain though. I'm fantasising about holding them in my hands.