Friday, April 13, 2007

SWITCH BITCH/THE LIVING/MISCELLANEOUS

Part of this year’s Reading Project is to make my way through three volumes of a five-volume anthology of Roald Dahl’s short stories handed down to me from my father. First up was Switch Bitch, which was amusing and disturbing in the way that all Dahl’s writing is, but also so singularly ribald I had to peek at the copyright page to see if the stories had originally been published in Playboy (answer: some of his stories were, but not these). They were enjoyable enough; the sexual politics were a bit antiquated, but each jerkwad male character reliably got his comeuppance by the end of the story. Still, by the end I needed a break from Dahl, so for my third book I embarked upon Annie Dillard’s The Living.

Now, I know Annie Dillard isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I love her nonfiction, particularly An American Childhood and The Writing Life. The Living is her one novel, and I’d long been curious about where I’d like it. When A’s mom gestured to a big bookcase last Thanksgiving and said I could have any of the books in it I wanted (she buys a lot of books to read on airplanes, because she travels almost constantly for her job, but she’s one of those people who tends to jettison them afterwards no matter how much she likes them, whereas I cling fiercely to my favorites for later rereading), The Living was one of the books I seized. Do I like it? Yes, and no, and then yes again. The book is about settlers in Washington state during the latter half of the nineteenth century, something I haven’t read much about before. It’s beautifully written and incredibly detailed, but there isn’t much narrative. So far the book has jumped impressionistically, episodically, from character to character; just when I’m settling into one story I get pulled out of it and into a new one. While Dillard does a great job of capturing the randomness and uncertainty and resignation of frontier life; the story meanders, and things just sort of happen, and a lot of people die suddenly and rather horribly. It feels quite real, but it’s not exactly plot-driven. I’m not sure if the whole thing is going to be like this; some of the separate threads are starting, languidly, to intertwine. But it’s essentially just one of those books where you have to sit back and enjoy the ride, and some days I can do this and some days I can’t. It’s been slow going—I’m only about a third of the way through after several weeks of reading. I’ve considered abandoning the book, but then the next day I’ll decide I like it. Still, I keep getting distracted by every nonfiction book that comes my way (see below).

Other books I’ve read: Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT, by Jane Stern. Mostly I read it because I’m a fan of the Roadfood books Stern has written with her husband, and because from her other writing she seemed like the last person in the world who’d become an EMT. Which is pretty much the point of this nice little memoir. Next there was Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which I found fascinating. I really like reading about the weird ways in which the human mind words. Now I’m gulping down Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, which chronicles a year’s worth of meals cooked and eaten by Slater. I love this level of detail, and I like Slater’s writing (his memoir Toast is also quite good). It’s sort of a cross between Laurie Colwin’s casual, comfortable food writing and Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer.