"Then you will have to make the choice. How much are you willing to gamble? Let's say you have a feeling about which door is the right one, a sort of gut instinct. Can you trust that instinct?
"Tough, isn't it?
"But the story ends when you open the door. It doesn't matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it's all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? These consequences are joined at the hip, they're Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it--all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you--it's still true you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You just got lucky, that's all."
-- a character in Peter Straub's A Dark Matter
I doubt I will surprise anyone if I mention that I am a voracious reader. I honestly don't know how many books I have read this year, or last year, or the year before, but I can say with certainty that I enjoy reading. And when I enjoy a book, I often wish to share it with others. Some of this desire to share is unselfish, merely wanting other people to enjoy something that I enjoyed, while another part of the desire to share comes from a more selfish need to discuss what I have read. And a third need, which gives rise to this post, is the need to infect other minds with the seeds of the same thoughts which have been planted in my brain.
Of course, like all advice, recommendations are dangerous. And the darker, more viscously-potent a brew, the more dangerous its recommendation. The nervous feeling that comes with recommending something you like ("what if he doesn't like it as much as I do?") goes off the charts when applied to a great work you still aren't sure that you like ("what if he doesn't understand that I don't exactly like this?").
So today I will discuss books which I consider among my favorites (though I'm not sure I like all of them), but do not recommend to people. Not that I recommend against them--I privately believe that many people should read many of these books--I simply do not want the liability of having recommended them. If you read these books, read at your own risk. Please do not somehow forever associate them with me.
Gregory's List of Books He Doesn't Quite Recommend
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
If you have seen the movie, you can probably understand why this book is on this particular list. I saw the movie before reading the book. I watched it one night with my father and brother. When it ended, we sat a bit stunned for a few seconds, and then said something like "that was...". I have now read the book (twice), and I still don't really have a word for it. I guess I would go with "Brutal", if someone held a captive-bolt pistol to my head and demanded a word. But a close second to "Brutal" would be some word like "Profound". One reason I hesitate to recommend the movie (aside from the gory brutality, of course), is the way in which the Horror/Slasher genre has desensitized people to brutality. When I hear people speak of No Country for Old Men as though it belonged in the same genre as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I know they did not (and possibly could not) "Get it". The makers of the film (the always excellent Coen brothers) definitely got "it", and they did a great job of presenting it, but in some ways a movie just cannot live up to a book. I do not exactly recommend this book, but I consider it well worth reading. One other warning (aside from the brutality, which I believe I have mentioned enough), McCarthy uses somewhat unconventional grammar and punctuation; if you are like me, you will have to work to repress your inner editor until you have gotten into the flow of the book.
Sample quotation:
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But
yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made
out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could
run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And
then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's
layin there?”
A Dark Matter by Peter Straub
This book is weird. It's not quite Stephen-King-on-mescaline weird, but it's still weird. It seems to have a lot of very deep things to say about the nature of morality and reality, but it also always feels like this seeming is not backed up by anything concrete (and this is very in line with the plot of the novel). This weirdness is one of the reasons I don't recommend this book (though I think it's great), the other is the author himself. Straub has produced a very mixed library. I very much recommend his horror novel Ghost Story. A Dark Matter, as I have mentioned, is in the complicated category of "not recommended (but great)". I very strongly recommend that you not read Mr. X, it is not just needlessly disturbing, but it's really not that good either.
Sample quotation: You've already had one.
THIS POST TO BE CONTINUED (it's suppertime here at Seeds West)
