Recent Reading

What's been on my nightstand/in the bag I take to work over the last few weeks?

(Yes, I'm envisioning this as a recurrent feature. Yes, I know you didn't ask for it. Sorry.)

New Avengers (1-6), Brian Michael Bendis and David Finch
Read this last night before going to bed. I've recently discovered that my local library system houses many a new comics collection, and I've been playing catch up with a whole bunch of titles I had abandoned when I gave up comics a few years back. I had read a fair bit of negative stuff about this one, but I liked it, if not wildly. Bendis writes the characters really, really well, and that's for me a key piece of any comic. The randomness of the team, and the kind-of-lameness at Cap assembling a new Avengers after Marvel went to all the trouble of blowing up the old one was assuaged in large part by the great character writing.

Paradise Lost, Philip Roth
I read The Human Stain when it came out a few years back and liked it, but was somewhat put off by how Roth would just abandon his narrative for pages at a time to indulge in long, wordy essay-like diatribes against race, class, or whatever other thematic elements the story was mucking about in. He does it here too, and, I'm supposing, throughout his work. And it's, for this reader, at least, a bit of a shame, since the actual plots and characters themselves are well worthy of the verbiage he instead spills pontificating outside of the narrative's confines.

Here there's also another twist--the main story, that of the terrorist act committed by the main character's daughter and what that act does to him and his family, isn't begun until a 100 or so pages in. The big front piece of the novel is taken up with Roth's doppelganger writer character, the version of himself he also plopped into The Human Stain, reminiscing for us about the main character as a high school sports God. And when the narrator (finally) begins to tell us the main story, it appears (and I haven't finished the novel yet--I've got another 100 pages to go, so I could be wrong here) that he's making it up, as away to explain what had happened to this hero from his youth to explain some odd behavior the narrator witnessed the hero engaging in. Very off-putting, and, again, sad, given that the actual story--that of the terrorist daughter and her family--is quite engaging.

The Man in My Basement, Walter Mosley
I've never read any Mosley, but had heard so many good things that I felt the need to check him out. This was a great short novel, with very well-drawn characters and a slightly absurdist situation that Mosley makes very real-feeling. My next step is to figure out the order of the Easy Rawlin's books and start diving into those.

Ultimate Fantastic Four, Volume II: Doom, Warren Ennis, Stuart Immonen
I love this take on the Four with one big exception--this whole "Doom has powers brought on by the same accident that created the FF" thing is just, well, dumb. And the notion that Doom was turned into some kind of metallic, hooved being by the accident is just blech. I'm looking forward to reading the Doom-less volumes three and four.

Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx
I hadn't read any Proulx, but the universal acclaim the film's been getting and the fact that The New Yorker put her short story up on their website for free spurred me to read it. As good as advertised. It's a powerful, moving, sad story that works in large part because of her ability to make the relationship, and the powerful lust and love between the two cowboys, real and not gimmicky. One of the better short stories I've read in a long while.

Until Whenever