Some Reading

Finished Volume I of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War the other day, then blasted through Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Great novel, though perhaps a bit unpolished – part of its conceit, but causes it to end abruptly and perhaps never commit to a mode: is it supposed to be a tale of Scottish adventure and family drama, like Kidnapped and David Balfour, or an exploration of evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or a dark journey through unavoidable passions in stormy landscapes, ala Wuthering Heights? Still quite entertaining. Will try to write more on it later. Just picked up John Gardner’s bio of Chaucer, but being more in the mood for fiction just now put it down almost immediately for American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Enjoyable and vulgar. Can see it as a comic book – Shadow’s early internal monologues and the wry humor more generally seem typical of the genre. Couldn’t help but compare the love-goddess-as-anthropophagous-whore scene early on to Lewis’s Aphrodite in Till We Have Faces. The former is horror-film gross, the latter deeply frightening in its darkness. Only about thirty pages in, though, so these are first impressions.