Reading Diary
a) Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist, by Stephen Janis
Stephen Janis is a Baltimore-based journalist, kind of a bigger fish in the same pond I dwell in, writes for some of the same places about some of the same things. He sent me a copy of his first book of fiction a while back, I guess under the dubious premise that anyone cares what I think on the rare occasion that I do post about literature, and I was happy to read it. The title, and the 'novelzine' tag, I have to admit had me a little nervous that it would be a little too pretentious, a little too post-modern, or something like that. But once I settled into the offbeat rhythms, and the line breaks and punctuation that felt more like poetry than prose, and got comfortable with the story's deliberate ambiguities (it takes place in an unnamed city that feels a lot like Baltimore if it were just a bit closer to total collapse), it was an interesting, unique little work. The big reveal of what the titular orange substance is all about, without saying too much about it to spoil it all, seemed kind of silly and unappealing to me, I don't know if I was wild about the theme that it all ended up being tied to, but I did like the way the story wound up and there was a lot of imagery that stuck with me.
b) The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, by David Simon and Edward Burns
As it happens, something else by a Bmore journo, and as with Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets, I came to this well after seeing Simon & Burns adapt it for the television. I'm only a third of the way through and need to check it out of the library again to finish it, but I'm pretty wrapped up in it so far, it somehow feels a lot denser and more packed with bigger ideas than Homicide, and puts a lot of ideas that pop up later in "The Wire" into work as more detailed, rigorously thought out observations and philosophies, plus the actual stories are just heartbreaking in that way where it doesn't even matter that they're true stories, just the characters/people are wrenching to read about.
c) The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
Considering how much various permutations of noir and hard-boiled detective mysteries have kind of become this huge, enduring chunk of film and television and pop culture, I've been wanting more and more to go back to the source, read some of the stuff that all these cliches and archetypes were birthed from, and this seemed like a good place to start. What I was kind of surprised by, though, was just how cinematic the writing is, the way Hammett details everyone's appearance and facial expressions to the letter, almost compulsively so, which is not something you really pick up on when people create various Sam Spade-ish characters and give them various twists and double crosses to navigate through.
Stephen Janis is a Baltimore-based journalist, kind of a bigger fish in the same pond I dwell in, writes for some of the same places about some of the same things. He sent me a copy of his first book of fiction a while back, I guess under the dubious premise that anyone cares what I think on the rare occasion that I do post about literature, and I was happy to read it. The title, and the 'novelzine' tag, I have to admit had me a little nervous that it would be a little too pretentious, a little too post-modern, or something like that. But once I settled into the offbeat rhythms, and the line breaks and punctuation that felt more like poetry than prose, and got comfortable with the story's deliberate ambiguities (it takes place in an unnamed city that feels a lot like Baltimore if it were just a bit closer to total collapse), it was an interesting, unique little work. The big reveal of what the titular orange substance is all about, without saying too much about it to spoil it all, seemed kind of silly and unappealing to me, I don't know if I was wild about the theme that it all ended up being tied to, but I did like the way the story wound up and there was a lot of imagery that stuck with me.
b) The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, by David Simon and Edward Burns
As it happens, something else by a Bmore journo, and as with Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets, I came to this well after seeing Simon & Burns adapt it for the television. I'm only a third of the way through and need to check it out of the library again to finish it, but I'm pretty wrapped up in it so far, it somehow feels a lot denser and more packed with bigger ideas than Homicide, and puts a lot of ideas that pop up later in "The Wire" into work as more detailed, rigorously thought out observations and philosophies, plus the actual stories are just heartbreaking in that way where it doesn't even matter that they're true stories, just the characters/people are wrenching to read about.
c) The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
Considering how much various permutations of noir and hard-boiled detective mysteries have kind of become this huge, enduring chunk of film and television and pop culture, I've been wanting more and more to go back to the source, read some of the stuff that all these cliches and archetypes were birthed from, and this seemed like a good place to start. What I was kind of surprised by, though, was just how cinematic the writing is, the way Hammett details everyone's appearance and facial expressions to the letter, almost compulsively so, which is not something you really pick up on when people create various Sam Spade-ish characters and give them various twists and double crosses to navigate through.
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on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 8:30 PM.
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Raymond Cummings : 11:42 AM