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'Gravity's' Dreamy Quality
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Published: August 31, 2008
The other night I tried to read part of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, $18) while I was very sleepy, which meant that the story, which is hard enough to follow when you're fully awake and completely engaged, took on a dreamy quality that I sort of enjoyed. After all, it sometimes reads as if Pynchon wrote the thing in a similar state.
I couldn't tell you exactly what happened, but I know it involved some spies and a rocket and perhaps a bungled relationship, although I seem to also remember a road trip of some sort (I was in the first chapter). Every week, someone tells me a similar story - they can only read at night, and they fall asleep while reading, so that the next day they can't remember anything of what they read. Or what they remember is blurry.
If this happens to you often, I'll give the advice I give them: Turn off the television and start reading earlier.
Anyway, Pynchon's on the bedside table this week, and probably for many weeks to follow. I'm really going about reading this book in the wrong way, I know. It obviously requires long periods of concentration and a large dictionary. I have the latter but not time for the former, so this will be the state of affairs for awhile.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I knocked out "Rapunzel's Revenge" (Bloomsbury USA, $18.99) in one night. A short review of the graphic novel appears on Page 11. .
I'm also reading "The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British" (W.W. Norton, $24.95), by Sarah Lyall, a New York Times columnist who married a Brit and now has written what is, so far (I'm on page 70), a hilarious account of living in London. It passed the "first 10 pages test" and the "read page 69" test, and so I think this one has broken through and earned the right to be finished (review to come, I'm sure).
My cup's kind of running over, to tell you the truth. One of my favorite writers, Arturo Perez-Reverte, has released a new book. "The King's Gold" (Putnam, $24.95), which I have to get to, soon. And Julian Barnes' new memoir, "Nothing to be Frightened Of" (Knopf, $24.95), comes out early next month. I need more rainy weekend days.
New releases: "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee," by Rebecca Miller (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $23). Miller, the wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, offers up an unconventional story told from the point of view of the woman in a May-December romance, a woman 30 years younger than her husband. In "Tomato Girl" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95), author Jayne Pupek, in her first novel, offers the tale of an 11-year-old girl who watches in dismay as her father develops a relationship with a teenage girl while her mother suffers from mental illness. And Kathryn Walker also offers a debut novel, "A Stopover in Venice" (Knopf, $24.95), about Nel, a young woman who becomes disenchanted with her musician husband during his European tour and finds herself involved in investigating a centuries-old art mystery with a handsome Italian (hmm, no woman would enjoy that sort of thing, right?).
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