We are celebrating World Book Night today (if that is not an oxymoron) in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the USA.
With the aid of my three lovely daughters I will be doing my bit later on, giving out twenty-four copies of The Road at my local railway station. The books are collected, my dismay upon taking a floppy, unwieldy package and not a neat box into my custody is long since dissipated (should have read the small print!) and the paperwork is complete. Hope the commuters will be receptive to Cormac McCarthy…
If you are participating today (and I know that a lot of bloggers are) I hope it goes well. And if you’re passing through my blog this World Book Night then chances are we are already sharing a passion for reading. Have a good one :)
It is a very long time since I last read anything written by George Eliot. The most recent would have been Middlemarch, my favourite, which I have read several times. This lapse will perhaps account for the strange illusion of Eliotlessness engendered by this novella. (Given a ‘blind test’ I might have named any number of authors, but I don’t think Eliot would have been amongst them.)
Getting through the reading schedule for Gravity’s Rainbow hasn’t been a problem at all, but the posting schedule is now lagging quite badly; particularly this week, following a sequence of posts at Infinite Zombies that have (not so subtly) influenced my intentions. After the brilliance of Daryl’s post on ‘The Scream’ I might as well have thrown in the towel and gone home. Why can’t I read like that?! But it was Christine’s post that really knocked me for six. Subsequently my perception of my own response to GR has undergone a radical change.
When I hear the phrase ‘music to invade Poland to’ I think of Rammstein, the German industrial metal band, and, specifically, their album Mutter. I was quite surprised to discover the sentiment of the popular trope quoted in GR in connection with Beethoven. 
Somehow, I missed out on Dr Seuss as a kid, but meeting him in the company of my own children has been ample compensation for the earlier deficiency. Most importantly, the books have come first, before the films, for both me and the kids. 
In this section it is episodes 3:11 and 3:15 that make the most striking impressions, although 3:12; as interpreted through the Companion, with helpful discussion of Beethoven, Rossini and the psychoanalytical theory of history; seems to give one of the clearer indications of Pynchon’s intentions while also being fully integrated, in true Pynchon style, with its neighbouring chapters.
I don’t recall liking the film of Wonderboys (just thinking of it brings Michael Douglas clashing unpleasantly into my head) and I don’t remember reading the novel of the same name, although I do recollect starting it. Not, then, a propitious introduction to Michael Chabon, but Gentlemen of the Road, largely through the means of a gorgeous cover, was able to overcome any residual resistance to the author.
Encountering this book unawares I can not imagine that I would have given it a second glance. ‘Bedtime Stories’ conjures up an image of cosy tales for children, or at least that is the construction I put upon the phrase. Happily a recommendation from the book’s owner bypassed any requirement for serendipitous acuity on my part.
