summer books

on the plane I read John Darnielle's 'novella' about the Black Sabbath record, Master of Reality. The book is written as part of a series where current musicians write about music that inspired them. Those who aren't big fans of the Mountain Goats may not know that John Darnielle is actually quite the fan of metal/hardcore music and he keeps a blog about it called Last Plane to Jakarta. Anyway the book is about this kid who is put in a mental hospital and has to keep a journal of his feelings, which happen to mostly be about how angry he is that his walkman and Black Sabbath tape were taken away from him. He equates their music to air. Anyway then there's a gap of ten years and he reflects about his time there and how he feels about the music later in his life. I found it very compelling because it was written so authentically. I suppose an easy comparison is Holden Caulfield, you just believe in the character so much that you forget they aren't real, that somebody else has created them. It is quite a short read though, regrettably. I hope that John Darnielle writes more in the future.

I also read the autobiography of Jean Rhys, an English writer famous for writing a prequel to Jane Eyre. It's written as a series of vignettes and although it is obviously in chronological order, it's not every little detail of her life. More like interesting or significant things that I suppose are remarkable because the book is quite short. Jean Rhys actually died before she finished writing it and a friend of hers collated notes from diaries to make it novel length. I really can't find the right words to express how much I enjoyed reading this.

I've been trying to read this book called The Collected Works of TS Spivet, by Reif Larsen, which is about a 13 year old boy who is some master cartographer, but I find it very difficult to read cause there are heaps of digressions and on top of the digressions there are these arrows going off to the side that take you to MORE digressions. The premise is that he's been invited to the Smithsonian to do a speech about map drawing or something, but he can't tell his parents that he's won this privelige so he has to travel across America without their permission. The only thing that's keeping me in the story is that his brother somehow killed himself with a gun on their ranch and I need to know what happened. Nice one, Larsen.

But really the book I am totally into at the moment is The Unbearable Lightness of being by Milan Kundera. It is magnificent. You must read it.