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Terms of the Duel

New-Year's resolutions have a pronounced and infamous tendency to fall by the wayside by, say, the 1st of February. Perhaps, however, that is because they are resolved upon, adhered to, and discarded, by solitary individuals. Perhaps what's needed is some good old-fashioned competitive spirit.

The participants:

  1. Ilya Gandelman - desk jockey from 9-5:30, Monday thru Friday. Free time activities include, but are not limited to, writing, reading, watching tv/movies (very selective in this area!), eating Meredith's delicious food, playing with Gizmo, spending time with family and friends.
  2. Meredith Gandelman - also a desk jockey, from 9-6, Monday thru Friday. Free time activities include, but are not limited to, reading, watching tv/movies, cooking/baking for Ilya (and others), snuggling/playing with Gizmo and spending time with family and friends.

The resolutions:

  1. To read more books
  2. To watch less television
  3. To spend less money (by reading library books, and by making our way through unread volumes gathering dust on the shelves)
  4. To spend more quality time together with a shared interest

Therefore, the challenge proposed: who can read the most books in a year? On one side the wife, on the other the husband: who'll get the most volumes under her or his belt before 2015?

The rules:

  1. Books will be chosen independently. Any genre or subject is eligible.
  2. No second thoughts once starting a book. An uncompleted book is not counted, except of course as time lost. We shall have to choose carefully; and if a book seems to be disappointing, best to soldier on through to the end!
  3. A 300-page minimum. However, books briefer than 300 pages may be combined with others to count as one entry in the Duel.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Brevity is the soul of wit

Pages read today: 78 for Meredith, 111 for Ilya

Today we decided mutually to bump up the minimum page-count requirement of the duel to 300 pages instead of 200. The latter is just too, too slim!

Meredith has been feeling under the weather, which has rather curtailed her reading for today (as we can see).

The "radically briefer" book I've opted to read after wrestling with Dostoevsky is What Maisie Knew, a short (248 sweet pages) novel by Henry James, published in 1897. It's about a very young child, the titular Maisie, who is caught in the middle of her parents' nasty divorce. The trick of the story is that the entire narrative is filtered through the young girl's perceptions and experiences, so that we have to interpret the character and behavior of the adults exclusively as they appear to the ripening understanding of the growing child. Seems like an interesting way to go about it (though previous James I've read has yet to inspire any especially ardent affection).

 The forbidding thing about Henry James, or, as he's called by his fans, "The Master," is that the more he writes, the more he writes; the longer his career as a writer went on, the more convoluted his prose style became. I do believe the Master's output is divided into stages, of which the last is characterized (among other things, I'm sure) by an especially ornate style, deployed, allegedly, in the service of making extremely fine psychological and moral distinctions. Maisie is not so late as other James works (he didn't surrender the ghost until 1916), but I do believe it's the latest of anything I've personally read, and though I'm not sure precisely when the "late James" period of his life is slated to begin, I am finding the prose style comparatively challenging (though not as challenging as it is in the book's Preface, which James wrote for a collected edition of his works dating from 1909). As a Faulkner devotee, a convoluted sentence should not frighten me... but at least Faulkner pauses every so often to identify, usually parenthetically, a dangling pronoun. James does not. Ow, my brain.

 Tomorrow is a holiday and I expect to finish the book. I'll write more about it then, hopefully more cogently.
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