Difficult reading...

Some books are difficult to read. Difficult in that they make you feel uncomfortable, sometimes even desperate to get away from what you are reading. Other books are difficult in other ways, maybe they are so dense in information that they feel heavy and your hands simply don't have the strength to hold them up anymore. Or maybe they are written in a way that simply bores you and your eyelids rebel by simply closing themselves off against it. Others are simply beyond comprehension. I read a book like that once, I'm talking of fiction here, not books about, say, modern fiscal policy or advanced quantum physics. It was absurd. Possibly absurdist, though it was a long time ago, I'll have to take another look to see if the person I am now can make some sense out of it.

There is only one book I ever started reading and didn't finish, A Brief History of Time. Not fiction, so my record of never not finishing a book of fiction remains untarnished, even in those cases where I really really don't want to. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was like that. A beautifully written book that described some of the most horrific scenes in explicit detail. So much so that my stomach churned and I often had to put the book aside for several days after reading a single chapter. It was that book I was thinking of when writing "desperate to get away from". But my pride kept me going. I'm glad I finished it, though I felt miserable the entire time.

I felt something similar, granted to a much lesser degree, with Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro. He wasn't describing anything truly horrific, but the so called protagonist was such a reprehensible human being. It's difficult to enjoy reading about someone that keeps ruining everything around them.

I just finished Jose Saramago's Blindness. I felt the same amount of cognitive dissonance with this novel as I did with Blood Meridian, and it took me quite awhile to finish the book because it just made me so fucking depressed. Partially because what he said rang true. If the world all the sudden suffered from an epidemic of blindness it's pretty likely a lot of these things would really happen. Desperate people, miserable people, opportunistic people... they would easily outnumber those guided by altruism. Fear is a powerful motivator. I can't rightly say that I myself wouldn't resort to some of these things if I was scared and starving, though I like to think I wouldn't. And the picture he paints, from this omniscient narrator's perspective that can peer into the minds of every character in the novel, is so real. I found myself putting the book down earlier today in order to change clothes and leave the house and I left all the blinds to my bedroom windows open without realizing it because it seemed to me that everyone in the world was blind and couldn't see into my house.

This book was also difficult to read on another level. He doesn't separate the dialogue in the traditional way, that is with quotation marks and the like. Everything said is separated by commas in these ginormous run on sentences (for the record, "ginormous" is a word fully recognized by my spellchecker). Full conversations take up several pages without even a paragraph indentation. It's an excellent stylistic tool that can really draw you in once you get used to it, but it can get tedious, especially when it's late and you start to get tired.

The next novel on my list, The Pillars of the Earth, comes in at over 950 pages. It makes me tired just looking at it, though I've been assured it's very compelling. But it's going to have to wait. I currently have checked out from the library (yes, I've rediscovered the joys of the public library system) the biographies of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, along with the a book on the development of early Jazz music. I'm in research mode likely until the beginning of next year. It's a reading list with an excellent soundtrack, btw. How often does that happen?