My Current Read

The magic of Leaflet.pub over the homegrown, markdown-driven blog on my website is that I’ve got access to a blog editor on my phone again. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still something satisfying about the pure DIY of working in a blank .md file and pushing a fresh commit to Github, but for the purposes of sheer output, being able to work from a mobile screen when necessary (or when more convenient) is pretty unmatched.

Plus, a variety of new and immediate publishing opportunities present themselves. I could, for instance, just as I’m writing this, snap a pic of what I’m currently reading and share it. To wit:

Sorry for the bedsheets-and-soft-lighting aesthetic, but we’re putting this together on the fly. Blogging!

Anyway, yes, current read is Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar: One Rainy Day in May. At 880 pages, it looks like a beast, but anyone familiar (heh) with Danielewski’s style from House of Leaves knows just how much his books can shift from dense to airy in a heartbeat. Some pages are full to bursting, while others hold only a scattering of words, often shaped to carry a visual weight as well as a textual one. A few samples:

Reactions I’ve gotten to this have been muted.

“Huh.”

“Interesting.”

“No, thanks.”

There’s a general suspicion of unnecessary complexity and cleverness for cleverness’s sake.

And that’s before I get to the fact that the book’s the first in an ultimately failed 27-part, multicharacter, multivoiced series that publisher Pantheon Books decided it couldn’t justify the printing costs of after just the first five volumes. So there’s a whiff of hubris coming off of it, too.

But I’m still giving it a try because 1) I enjoyed House of Leaves a good deal, and 2) the ambition of the whole thing intrigues me, even if it’ll never be realized in full. I’m always down for a grand, maximalist project; the question’s just whether it’s done well. I doubt I’ll read all five volumes (this is the only one I’ve got on my shelf a the moment), but I want a sample—a hint of the thing’s sweep and execution.

I’m in the 500s at this point, of the total 880 pages, and some narrative threads have been working better than others. The Xanthar, Astair, and Anwar chapters: yes. The Luther Perez chapters: ehhhhhhhh. The Cas chapters: not enough data to compute.

But maybe best to save some thoughts for additional posts. This is just a check-in, really, an excuse to do a little more table-setting as I get this thing going.

For now, back to the book.