STONER (John Williams, 1965)
THE BLACK DAHLIA (James Ellroy, 1995)
RED HARVEST (Dashiell Hammett, 1929)
WAR AND PEACE (Leo Tolstoy, 1869)
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (Ursula K Le Guin, 1969)
MIDDLEMARCH (George Eliot, 1872)
FRANKENSTEIN (Mary Shelley, 1818)
THE BODY ARTIST (Don DeLillo, 2001)
BLINDNESS (José Saramago, 1995)
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (Ray Bradbury, 1962)
KINDRED (Octavia Butler, 1979)
THE MEMORY POLICE (Yoko Ogawa, 1994)
Perhaps the return to mowing the in-lawn was more beneficial than I thought, especially since I seem to have abandoned podcasts for audiobooks and, in this second grand mowing, managed to listen to all of David Lynch's - not David Lunch, as I usually type it – CATCHING THE BIG FISH. Fascinating to read/hear how many of my work habits – or, rather, the ones to which I'm trying to return – are from this book I picked up in a Salem, MA used bookstore more 15 years ago:
And then you go to work. The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It's always a process of building and destroying. And then, out of this destruction, discovering a thing and building on it... Then it's a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find that you're leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That's action and reaction.
I've got the chair(s) and now I need to relearn how to allow myself that time and space – and to not fill the space I do have with pointless trivialities; as Don DeLillo reminds us, "A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."
First (re)reading of the month complete, DeLillo's THE BODY ARTIST, and wanted to record first, immediate, visceral thoughts in the 18 minutes left in my reading time: an unsettling snapshot of grief and shock – the grief of shock, the shock of grief – and the unmooring that ensues, the loss of identity, of self, the pressure of finding a new one, of grasping for one...
Is reality too powerful for you?Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life.
… that ranks still – as it has since my first reading in 2014 (has it really been eight years? reality reality) – among my favorite books, probably my favorite of his; followed quickly by UNDERWORLD and LIBRA (the other two contenders for the favorite DeLillo title), my first recommendation to anyone seeking to dive into DeLillo's work.
Next up on the (re)read list: Carson McCullers’s THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.