No new books this week as I’ve been unusually restrained. Things have been quieter than usual here lately, I seem to have been stuck in a mild reading rut. Just not at all inclined to pick up a book. I don’t think anything in particular has caused it, just necessary to take a break and watch lots of Gilmore Girls. A Sunday afternoon spent in bed with Transmetropolitan graphic novels (and a “oh my God why alcohol why” sized hangover) may have yanked me out of my reading rut, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Do you have any suggested remedies for breaking out of a reading rut? Or do you just ride it out until the urge to read hits again?

Posts on Start Narrative Here this week:

• Recently Abandoned: August 2010 – the books I couldn’t get through last month.
• The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson – a quietly terrifying novel about a psychotically murderous deputy sheriff.

Last night I saw a documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (Yony Leyser, 2009), which explored the life and work of, you guessed it, one William S. Burroughs. Despite being more of a Kerouac and Ginsberg fan when it comes to the Beats, I really want to read more Burroughs. Maybe not the best thing to dive into when reluctant to read at all, but eventually. I read Junky, Queer and Interzone many moons ago, in high school, but perceptions and approaches change, and I think I’d like to see how I would read them now.

My high school fascination with the Beats was so well known – by the school librarians who I endlessly bothered with requests for Beat books from other libraries (we were a part of the local library system) – that at the end of year 12 when it came to the graduation ceremony, I was given an award, basically, for showing an active interest in reading, writing and libraries. Nerd then, nerd now. Anyway, I was presented with a lovely hardback edition of Kerouac’s letters. When I went to thank the librarian (polite nerd then, not so polite nerd now), she asked if there had been anything in the book itself. Nope. Then she let poor graduating high school student me know that the prize was actually for $250, but they needed something to present it in. I eventually got the cheque, and the moral of this story is: crime may not pay, but reading sometimes does.

A warning to all, especially those on self-imposed book buying bans, this post features an obscene amount of books. First, some ebay packages arrived. Then I found out one of my favourite secondhand bookstores in the city was going out of business and selling all their books for $1. Yes, $1. I set myself a modest limit of $20 and let loose, coming out with only (cough, only? My shoulder and hands disagree) 19 books. The day after the sale ended, my sister happened to be wandering by and they were chucking books into a dumpster; she scored some really good stuff too.

• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
• Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan
• The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Liana by Martha Gellhorn
• Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner
• The Ghostly Lover by Elizabeth Hardwick
• The Simple Truth by Elizabeth Hardwick
• Pentimento by Lillian Hellman
• Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
• An Unfinished Woman by Lillian Hellman
• Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek by Enrique Hank Lopez
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
• The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings by Katherine Anne Porter
• In Pursuit of Hygiene by Helen Razer
• Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson
• Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy by Carl Rollyson
• With Fondest Regards by Françoise Sagan
• Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

And then, yes, that’s just my loot from during the week, there was Clunes. I came well under budget, spending much less than I thought I would. It was a great day, lovely surrounds and buildings, a good vibe, a few friendly dogs and lots of books.  Here’s my haul:

• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell [review]
• Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet
• Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps by Emmett Grogan
• Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
• From Here to Eternity by James Jones
• Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac
• The Penguin Book of New American Voices edited by Jay McInerney
• The Group by Mary McCarthy
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
• A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• The Public Image by Muriel Spark
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
• Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson
• The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

And, a few interesting articles from the week:

• Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts by Bailey Kennedy
• Faking Nice in the Blogosphere: Women and Book Reviews by Sarah McCarry (A must read, in my opinion.)
• Mae at Mad Bibliophile has written up a summary of her day at Clunes, including a photograph of the pony in a local front yard. (!)
• Does Twitter Sell Books? Our Quasi-Scientific Study by Paul Young

I have been waiting for this one for a few weeks now – I know, impatient – and was worried it wasn’t going to arrive at all – I know, paranoid – but it did and I’m pretty sure I will love it. There are photos of Carson and Reeves I haven’t seen before, and a happy snap of Carson and Tennessee which is really beautiful. Also, it includes a collection of letters sent between Carson and Reeves during World War 2 when Reeves was stationed in Europe. The parts I’ve allowed myself to read seem very sweet, very touching.

• Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Carson McCullers

I’ve been rather well behaved on the book buying front for a while now, the local library is having a big pre-loved/ex-library book sale this week and I’m expecting to donate a fair amount of cash for their efforts. It is all in the name of charity though, so, come on, as if I could possibly say no!

Suzanne Munshower over at the Guardian contemplates e-book versus printed books:

One aspect of the electronic reader that tempts me – and I’m an old fuddy duddy so I have to admit it might be the only one – is its space-saving ability. Is there a reader out there who doesn’t occasionally feel crushed by possessing too many books?

My sister moved out this week and we did a bit of a swap. Two James Dean prints – which she has been bugging me about for years – and my small bookshelf for a larger bookshelf. How could I resist the lure of a bigger bookshelf? At the moment though, while her old room gets cleaned out, all of my books, ALL 456 OF THEM, are stacked in piles around my room. Some of them are manageable and have been for a while, but the rest of them are in a chaotic mess waiting to be re-shelved in their new home. Sigh. So yes, the possibility of crushing by Penguin paperback is at an all time high at the moment.

The fortieth anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac prompted this article about his legacy. The article is not particularly enlightening but some of the comments are thought-provoking. I, myself, love Kerouac. That said, I have never finished On the Road. (To add to the guilt, I own two different copies of it, as it was originally published, and the original scroll version.) I’ve read a number of his other books and loved most of them, but I’ve never actually made it to the end of On the Road. It’s not out of a dislike or boredom, I’ve just never actually finished it. I’ve read halfway many, many times. I’ve even read half of it out loud to a friend but … you get the idea. Does this make me a terrible Kerouac fan? I don’t know, but I love his writing and energy in his other books, and I’m always intrigued by new appraisals and interpretation and re-tellings of his life, misunderstood or not. Possible reading goal for for 2010: to FINISH reading On the Road, possibly even both versions?

(Now that I think about it, I’m the same with Bret Easton Ellis; I’ve read and loved all of his books but have never made it all the way through American Psycho. Weird.)

Congratulations to everyone who completed the 24 hour Read-a-Thon this weekend! I had intended to participate but real life plans kind of interfered. Thanks to all the cheerleaders that stopped by just in case I was participating, maybe next time I’ll actually do the reading marathon, I would really love to.

A few ebay purchases arrived this week, a pay day and an unusually restrained visit to the Federation Square book market.

• The First Third by Neal Cassady
• Jack Kerouac: A Biography by Tom Clark
• Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
• Sanctuary by William Faulkner
• Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (review)
• The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

This week I’ve been reading The Sandman comics/graphic novels/whatever your preferred term of endearment/books by Neil Gaiman. Immensely enjoyable, but I don’t feel adequate reviewing them, I don’t know how to speak about them. Maybe a summary post when I finish all of them off? I’ve also just started Truman Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Although, I am expecting McCullers’ unfinished autobiography – Illumination and Night Glare – to arrive this week and I can see myself ignoring everything else and devouring that quite easily in a day or so. I don’t really know what I’ll find myself reading next.

How do you choose what to read next? Do you plan your reading ahead of time, knowing what book you will be picking up next, or do you act solely on instinct?

Brace yourself, dear readers.

I didn’t buy any books (gasp! shock! horror!) so I have nothing to report on the rabid book-buyer front this week. Instead, seeing it feels as though it has been a while between reviews, I’ll quickly chat about what I have been reading. I’m working my way through Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, which, despite it’s heavy use of a Scottish accented prose and slang and a generally downbeat demeanour, is keeping my attention. That is, when that attention isn’t being distracted by Hunter S. Thompson with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. H.S.T. is managing to captivate me and get me involved in the American politics of 37 years ago with his outlandish wit and fierce mockery of the system. I’ve still got some Chuck Palahniuk books to read, but I think maybe the Palahniuk wave has crashed and I might be a bit over it? I’ll see how I feel when I finish these two books.

I started watching the first season of Mad Men this week, and the incredibly handsome Jon Hamm has me really wanting to read/reread some Jack Kerouac. Anyone else think Hamm would make a great Kerouac if someone had the lack of decency to make a film version of his life? Speaking of Mad Men, here’s me and Don Draper at an after-work rendezvous via the way too much fun on a boring Sunday afternoon at work Mad Men Yourself:

So, Don, what have you been reading?

Ahem. Cartoon vanity and daydreams of meeting some dashing Don Draper look-a-like over a cocktail or two aside, here are some bookish articles that I found interesting this week. Douglas Coupland writing for the Guardian on his personal circumstances while he wrote Generation X:

“And so I started to write the book. I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I’d sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn’t happening in reality. In the book there was the idea that people marooned in life could unmaroon themselves by telling stories to each other. That still seems to me to be a valid way of seeing the world. There was also the notion that telling stories was a way of coping with information overload – hence the book’s subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture. In 1989, information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of 10, as well as push-button phones instead of rotary dial phones – quaint now, but back then it felt real. What was really going on with the writing of X was, I suspect, the use of storytelling as a form of creative pattern recognition from which clues to psychic survival might erupt. That’s possibly what storytelling is in a large sense, and it’s what I do for a living, the most recent evidence of which is Generation A, a follow-up to X where the cultural acceleration experienced by the characters is palpable rather than theoretical.”

Heather Dent over at PopMatters writes a reflective eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson:

“For generation after generation, Thompson rocked/rocks/will rock the dominant paradigm, describes our national character; corruption, inequality, mediocrity, freedom and fun, Fear and Loathing. His words, all the more relevant today, continue to delight and rattle us.”

Over at the New York Times, Arthur Krystal contemplates writers who appear to be terrible conversationalists.

And, finally, in my constant search for news, articles and basically anything of interest regarding Carson McCullers, Google News search turned up a review of a bar in Portland, The Press Club, which has a selection of crêpes named after authors. It appears that the owners have some good taste in literature as one of the crêpes is named after McCullers and I’m curious about how they decided that this particular combination of ingredients – “mozzarella, mushrooms, red peppers, and spinach” – represented Carson McCullers? In lieu of a ticket to Portland, I’m tempted to try and create my own version of crêpe à la Carson and report back on my findings.