I purged a bunch of stuff off the shelves. Of course, not everything I got rid of is something I didn’t like — I just figure it can remain part of my virtual library without having to take up real space. And of course, some of the stuff I got rid of I’ve already forgotten and hope to never think about again. Here are a few that stay in the virtual library.

*** Walter Gropius – The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. I took a modern architecture class in college, for which this was one of the textbooks. I love modern architecture, both the good and the bad, both the successes and the magnificent failures, and I love the Bauhaus. I kept this so long mostly as a reminder of that.
*** Julian Barnes – Talking it Over. This was the book that taught me terms like “crepuscular” and “rebarbatively quotidian”. It’s also one of the first “unreliable narrator” books I remember really noticing and appreciating. Its Rashomon-like structure makes for some very funny bits. I may even want to reread this one again someday (though I somehow never connected that much with other of his books), but had gotten kind of tired of it.
** Milorad Pavic – Dictionary of the Khazars. One of the few books that survived the wax and wane of my interest in experimental fiction. I read a lot of gimmicky books for a while there, and this was one of the few in which I thought the gimmick (story told in a series of encyclopedia entries in multiple conflicting encyclopedias, and the user must do his own cross-referencing) had something to it. Though as often happens, the decent gimmick was somewhat wasted on a story that wasn’t itself that compelling (see e.g. Timecode).
*** Roald Dahl – My Uncle Oswald. I love Roald Dahl, but Uncle Oswald isn’t really one of his better inventions.
*** Dorris Dorrie – Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing. I really liked this book sometime in the 90s (and the lovely Edward Gorey cover on my edition), but I just didn’t think I’d want to read it again.
Leo Marks – Between Silk and Cyanide. Already reviewed.
Charles Yu – Third Class Superhero. Already reviewed.
Patrick Neate – City of Tiny Lights. Already reviewed.
Patrick Suskind – Perfume
Jeffrey Steingarten – The Man Who Ate Everything
Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual. I mostly enjoyed this. It was left behind by an ex-girlfriend.

** Matt Ruff – Sewer, Gas, and Electric
*** Michael Moorcock – Elric (the original six novels)
*** Wendy Pini – Law and Chaos
*** Jim Thompson – The Grifters

I really enjoyed Sewer, Gas, and Electric the first time around. This time it just felt like someone trying too hard to throw a bunch of “funny” stuff into one book in order to create the best-sounding back-cover blurb. Giant killer sharks in the NYC sewers! A shark named after a beer!!! Etc! It was an okay time, but eh.

Michael Moorcock is not a bad writer. Or so I’m told — I don’t feel like I can judge very well, since I read most of his stuff when I was much younger and perhaps not a great judge of writing quality. However, the Elric books are really not that well written. There’s a lot of the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing — we’re often told things are evil or unnatural or whatever, and we have to take it on trust. It’s all fairly trashy — and yet, I pretty much sped through the entire six-book series (six thin, lightweight books, I admit) at full speed, compelled to see the whole thing through. So he’s got something going for him. Anyway, Elric is a lovable hero, the tortured emo anti-hero, doomed to kill those he loves and agonize about it to the uncaring gods. Plus, he looks cool.

Having finished the Elric books off, I decided to dig out Law and Chaos, Wendy Pini’s book of drawings from her never-realized animated Elric movie. I’ve had that book about as long as my Elric books (and going back to when I read ElfQuest and may even have admitted to reading it in public), and so her images are inseparable from Moorcock’s words in my head. It’s probably been 20 years since I even looked much at that book, and many of the scenes were still perfectly familiar. The art isn’t great — it’s a little too elfish/fey for Elric perhaps (not surprising from a very young-at-the-time artist who would go on to create ElfQuest) and it certainly doesn’t shy away from the emo aspect of Elric (again, not surprising), but it’s mostly a good fit for Moorcock’s character, and anyone who likes Elric would probably appreciate it.

The Grifters was good stuff, makes me want to read more Jim Thompson.

*** Denise Mina – Deception
*** Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop

Deception is a sort of thriller/mystery, with a sometimes unlikeable and pathetic narrator, Lachlan. His wife has been convicted of murder, and as he tries to find evidence to exonerate her, he instead learns more and more about the deceptions that underlay his marriage. In the end, the book is more a psychological portrait, of Lachlan and of the relationship of these two people. I found it interesting for its story and characters, but also to the extent that anyone who’s been in a relationship can identify somewhat with what goes wrong in this one. Anyway, this was my first Denise Mina book, and though it’s apparently nontypical, I’m looking forward to reading more.

I don’t feel like I really “got” Death Comes for the Archbishop. It was good, and I found the character of Latour fairly interesting, but on the whole I didn’t find the book that compelling. I felt like there was a certain amount of distance maintained between the reader and the characters, partly because large portions of their lives were sort of skipped over. For example, for much of the book Latour wants to build a cathedral, and it seems like it may become part of his big life’s work, a major focus of the book. But then the book skips ahead a bit, the cathedral is casually mentioned as having been completed, and that’s the last we hear. I also kept wondering why Willa Cather wanted to tell the story of this guy and what I the reader was supposed to get out of it. Of course, sometimes one wants to tell the story of an ordinary person, but in most books I think there’s some core character trait or story that the author feels compelled to draw out and present to readers. In this book I kept wondering — why does Cather care, and why should I?