May. 2nd, 2010 09:26 pm
Evitando los detectives
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muckefuckSo when it comes to my recreational reading, the question I've been asking myself recently is, "How many novels will I read to avoid picking up Los detectives salvajes?" So far, at least three. After I finished the Vanderhaeghe, I went back to my Unread shelf and settled on a shorter Faulkner novel, The Unvanquished. Still took a week and a half of reading it in ten-minute snatches on the shuttle to finish the damn thing. During that pass, I selected a few other possibles, among them Somerset Maugham's The razor's edge; I've just now made it to the end of Part One.
It's a shame for a lot of reasons that our trip to Spain didn't come off this year, and one of the most minor of them is that it would've provided me a deadline for making progress on Bolaño's novel. On the one hand, I'd've been zealously working on building up my Spanish, a task that reading an advanced text in the language would naturally complement. On the other, I'd've had a definite date for having to face the woman who gave me the book, la madre de mi cuñada, and that's not a meeting I'd like to walk into empty-handed, as it were.
The perfectionist in me makes me unreasonably intimidated by new beginnings, so I decided I had to do something to subvert it. Tonight, after a cool day of mostly cloudy skies, the sun finally started to break through shortly before setting. So after dinner I sat down in the comfy chair amid the golden light of dusk, brought out my copy, and read through a couple of excerpts. (Fortunately, the episodic nature of middle section is very conducive to this.) At least that way, when I finally do tackle it, I won't be reading all 600 of its pages for the very first time--not to mention the fact that it's very encouraging to have a dictionary to hand and crack it open fewer times than the number of pages.
It's a shame for a lot of reasons that our trip to Spain didn't come off this year, and one of the most minor of them is that it would've provided me a deadline for making progress on Bolaño's novel. On the one hand, I'd've been zealously working on building up my Spanish, a task that reading an advanced text in the language would naturally complement. On the other, I'd've had a definite date for having to face the woman who gave me the book, la madre de mi cuñada, and that's not a meeting I'd like to walk into empty-handed, as it were.
The perfectionist in me makes me unreasonably intimidated by new beginnings, so I decided I had to do something to subvert it. Tonight, after a cool day of mostly cloudy skies, the sun finally started to break through shortly before setting. So after dinner I sat down in the comfy chair amid the golden light of dusk, brought out my copy, and read through a couple of excerpts. (Fortunately, the episodic nature of middle section is very conducive to this.) At least that way, when I finally do tackle it, I won't be reading all 600 of its pages for the very first time--not to mention the fact that it's very encouraging to have a dictionary to hand and crack it open fewer times than the number of pages.
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