hakopais my name in Maori.

… there will be no doing of work (I’ve worked enough this week), no heading into the office (the working on weekends kinda needs to come to an end), no drinking (um, yeah…), no XBOXing (I have yet to get around to getting a new console) and hopefully no internet (shit becomes addictive).

I need to read, relax and catch up on desperately needed sleep.

Thanks to birthday book vouchers, I’ve procured for this weekend…

A Gate At the Stairs by Lorrie Moore : this is miss thing’s latest novel after a so-so novella and some seriously stonkingly good short stories. I’m quite excited about reading this.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave : I read a few pages in the bookstore and figured why not. After all, I’m all about the darkly comic.

American Rust by Philipp Meyer : the guy at the bookstore recommended this when I previously bought a Cormac McCarthy. That bodes well.

PS: the book holding up the three books is my replacement copy of Lorrie Moore’s collected short stories, after The Bassoonist ended up with my original copy.

This is the beginning of a New York Times review of Lorrie Moore’s new book, A Gate At The Stairs.

New.

Book.

This is very exciting news. Lorrie Moore’s short stories are wonderful with eerily-real characters that highlight the extraordinary within the mundane. I only hope that this proves to be a better read than the last long-format book of hers I’ve read, Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?.

The review doesn’t provide much hope of that with it’s grasping attempts to divine positive praise for A Gate At The Stairs. “Narrative stumbles” has me more than a little concerned.

I’ll still buy the book and read it.

I’d just like to think I could enjoy it.

Also, nice to see a new photo of the author. Every book of hers I have bears the same obviously dated photo on the back. She’s aged well.

From top to bottom:

1. Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith : yes, I do realise this looks like airport fiction, but I’ve enjoyed the character of Arkady Renko ever since watching the film version and then reading the book Gorky Park. The subsequent novels with the character have been good enough to maintain my interest in the series, so I figured why not.
2. The Plague by Albert Camus : a novel about the destruction of social order and the reduction of otherwise upstanding individuals to base human beings struck me as somewhat Cormac McCarthy in theme, but not in style.  Colour me intrigued.
3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov : I’ve been meaning to get back to this ever since… well, then.
4. And The Ass Saw The Angel by Nick Cave : two words : “Gothic tragedy”
5. The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore : with Like Life and Birds Of America, Lorrie Moore constructed charming stories of scarily-familiar characters that were intriguing in the most mundane of situations.  I’m hoping for more of the same delights in this collection that includes her harder to obtain earlier short story releases.
6. The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis : I’m a sucker for recommendations from cute guys at bookstores and, yes, I do have his number.
7. I Like You by Amy Sedaris : every gay man loves her as much as everyone else loves her gay brother David.  The book is about hospitality and entertaining.  The woman is ridiculously funny.  How could I not want to read this book?
8. The Messenger by Markus Zusak : I bought this on the strength of his earlier book, The Book Thief.  I’m expecting good things.
9. Imperium by Robert Harris : apparently I remind the owner of this book of the character, Cicero.  I’m interested to see what exactly that means.
10. Tree Of Smoke by Denis Johnson : I bought this on the basis of his earlier book, Jesus, Son.  Read the explanation and you’ll understand why.
11. The Joke’s Over by Ralph Steadman : A Hunter S Thompson biography by a man who writes well.

So… what’s in your ‘to read’ pile?

Cormac McCarthy’s Child Of God treads similar ground to The Road in the sense that we’re delivered a winding tale of increasing depravity. That however is probably where the similarities end.

Child Of God centres around the miserable daily existence of a man, Lester, that loses a lot of what most people would take for granted. A place to call home. A place to take shelter. A reason to life beyond simply waking up each day. In essence, he lost a lot of what binds most of us together and it is in that that we see a man progressively drift further and further away from what we might consider ‘appropriate behaviour’. There is an instance where Lester happens upon a dead couple in coitus in a car on the side of the road. It is here that he commits a series of actions that while entirely unplanned all the same bear the marks of a person becoming less and less… well, ‘human’.

The book isn’t entirely about sickening scenes. Rather interestingly, the related stories of Lester’s past and upbringing serve as a suggestion of fate running its course, of a person satisfying the less-than-stellar expectations of his community. What makes this interesting is that for all Lester seems to abandon the trappings of civil society, and for all civil society finds him abhorrent, civil society all the same abides and tolerates what they themselves consider intolerable. The permissive behaviour of the community to what they knew to be really quite wrong behaviour on Lester’s part raised questions I am still struggling to answer: is Lester the realised consequence of his past, or the product of a society that didn’t care enough to stop him from becoming ‘inhuman’?

I know my language is vague and I’ve meant for that to be the case. To be more precise and exacting would be to reveal too much of a book I think you might enjoy if you enjoyed The Road. You will certainly see shades of one in the other, but there is enough different in each for them to stand on their own merits. Just don’t expect something quite as gripping or awkwardly tender about Child Of God.