Two shocking scenes

It seems I am capable of being the kind of person who reads more than one book at a time (not including the couple books it's taking me years to get through and which I will not consider abandoned).

Even while I promised myself I'd make a concerted effort to move through The Magic Mountain this winter, it turns out that the book I consider myself to be reading (ie, the one I'd name if someone asked, so whatcha readin' these days?) is too cumbersome to carry on my commute as it doesn't slide nicely into either my purse or my lunch bag, and even though I carried it with me a couple times anyway in my hand, basically I've had enough of that shit, I don't like carrying stuff, I can't handle the extra baggage, it doesn't sit well in my psyche, so it's become my at-home book to read, usurping Thomas Mann at bedtime, and I've had to start reading yet another novel but this one chosen specifically for its virtue of travelling well (so it be one of several I've amassed lately in digital format).

So I read for a few minutes this morning, my at-home book, with my coffee while the child breakfasts and I await my turn to shower. I don't remember what I fell asleep to, but the caffeine jolts me into realizing oh my gawd he's dead and decapitated and he's watching his body be torn apart by wolves. And with this thought in my head I start my day — walk the kid to school, head down into the metro, and open my other book.

There's something very zen about my metro book — the long probable-ascent of the silent elevator, the blank office, the idyll of the animals outside the gate, the labyrinth of caves. Time to go to work.

I read again on my way home. "He spreads wide my right eye with his fingers and pushes the knife into my eyeball." Ew. "The knife sinks into my eyeball soft and silent, as if dipping into jelly." This time I say it out loud. Eww. On the metro. People look at me. It's my stop.

I don't know how people can stand the intensity of more than one book at a time, when you don't know what happens next and you can't balance your choices for mood, or attitude, it's too much of a good thing, or at least, too much of a thing, I don't think I can go on like this.

Hyperborean

The Sun Dogs were two well-built Brits or Scands in torn cashmere, and their gear consisted only of an electric cello, plugged into a compressed-air auxetophone amplifier that looked like a threatening tuba, and a Frying Pan amplified to the point of distortion. As soon as the room started to vibrate, and as a dark, ominous drone started to coil around the walls, it became palpably clear that this music directly linked one's eardrum to one's intestines and that it was, beyond good or bad, to be digested rather than listened to. It also had at times, under the murk, the repetitive, trance-like quality of Eskimo chant. This indeed was not without its effect upon intoxicated listeners, who swayed back and forth with the ebb and flow of the gravelly sound waves. The Sun Dogs' best song was called Hyperborean, and if Gabriel understood it correctly, it was a cryptic paean to snowcaine.

— from Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat.

It's kind of fun to be reading something with this setting when it's still so bitter cold outside. "April may be the cruellest month, but in North Wasteland, February was a tough bitch in her own right." The language is exuberant. I get the feeling he's trying to be more a China Miéville, but he's coming off like a Susanna Clarke. I don't mean for the comparison to be entirely discreditable, but there is a sense of being carried away by the language without there always being the substance to ground it. But that's OK; I like being carried away.

New year, new books

Working my way through Simenon's romans durs, one by tragic one. Ordering them one by one, on an as-needed basis; otherwise, I fear I would glut on them, not sleep at all, perhaps drink myself to death, or just leave. Greatly relieved to discover that NYRB is issuing another one this year, so I don't yet have to fear running out.

Treated myself to Aurorarama, by Jean-Christophe Valtat, because it sounds breathtakingly lovely and weird, and I'm particularly enamored of the possibility to confront for myself the copyeditor's dilemmas therein. Seems I'm not yet in the mood for it, though.

After talking up the brilliance of China Miéville and of The City & the City in particular to various coworkers, I'm all in a lather over when there might be something more for me to read, and lo! Embassytown! Sounds like a sequel! But no! it's something entirely new!

Resolving also to finish The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) before the winter is through.

That is all.