Books: I Need Somebody in There
Despite all the noise online and offline about the decline of reading and the decline of literature, I’m still reading books. Quite a lot of them. I had some difficult years when personal grief took all my emotional capacity and I couldn’t read novels with any kind of conflict in them. Even then, I was reading non-fiction. Recently I’ve been tearing through book after book. Some of them I really liked. I do believe some of the novels that came out in the last few years are as good as any of the classics.
That being said, I did come across a few books that just rubbed me the wrong way. Some I abandoned. Others I pushed myself through. I don’t want to name names here and I’m not trying to attack any hard-working author, but I thought it’d be interesting to explore why those particular books didn’t work for me, and to see if you, dear reader, share any of these frustrations.
I came across the first book through a YouTube movie reviewer. He’s very much into hard-boiled detective stories in any shape or form, and he recommended one that’s a cross between cozy fiction and the hard-boiled genre. Cozy, as in: set in a bookshop, with small local conflicts, idiosyncratic characters, and environments you could relax into. Hard-boiled, as in: a gumshoe down on his luck, with a strong code of ethics and a weakness for the ladies.
It went wrong about halfway through. For the first half of the book I endured the burgeoning relationship between the ghost of the detective and the bookshop owner, and the lengthy introduction of the main characters, the suspects, and the idiosyncratic supporting cast drawn largely from the book industry. But at the midpoint I couldn’t get through a ten-page description of a setting for a short “let’s sit down and discuss” scene. The characters go from A to B, with every person, bush and paving stone catalogued on the way, and then comes a lengthy tour of B, every nook and cranny, plus new supporting characters, their backstory, their motivations, and the main character’s feelings towards all of them. Life is too short for a book that’s ninety percent filler, and by then I’d lost interest in whodunit, and why.
The difference was sharp when I rewatched The Big Lebowski yesterday. The movie takes the hard-boiled genre and then promptly deconstructs it with much delight and whimsy. By the end, the case, the victim, the perpetrators and the detective have all become inconsequential or non-existent. But still, The Dude abides.
Another book I’ve found too disturbing to read, for now, is the memoir of Lemonheads singer Evan Dando. The opening finds him on the street, in shambles, with a daily heroin habit. Then we go back to the beginning of his story, and drugs are already at the center of that too. I decided I didn’t want to spend hours inside his drug life.
I’d recently finished another rock-and-roll autobiography, by Genesis bassist Mike Rutherford. He freely admits regular cocaine use, but it’s quite tangential to the story, and overall I got swept up in a fascinating career and life. Right after, I went back to listening to some Genesis albums, and I love when books make me do that. A couple of months ago I read Kim Thayil’s new book as well. I’ve always loved Soundgarden, and the book helped me understand why so many of their albums contain gems but are frustratingly uneven overall.
Last week I was trying to use up my leftover Audible credits, and came across a self-help book promising to help me stop overthinking. I’m prone to overthinking, so it sounded useful. When I started listening, the book sounded so much like AI writing that I couldn’t bear to go on. Middling, characterless text, with no sense of a person behind it. I couldn’t stop overthinking whether it was AI or not, so I stopped listening.
What links the three, I think, is that I want to feel someone choosing. The detective novel’s author stopped deciding what mattered, so every bush, blush, and paving stone got in. Dando decided, and decided clearly. I’m the one who couldn’t follow him there. The self-help book had nobody in it at all. I’ll forgive a book a great deal, it turns out, but not an empty chair.
But I’m happy to report that sufficient time has passed since 1986, when Genesis released Invisible Touch. Today I can, yet again, happily listen to that album, decades of mainstream radio play finally washed out of my system.
