Daylight Savings Fiction

Woken this morning at 4 AM by old DNA set to non-daylight-savings-time. I got up and made myself a cup of tea and finished off the last forty pages or so of Susanna Clarke’s ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell‘ which I’d been seeing in the periphery of my vision in various bookstores for a few months but finally broke down and bought on the strength of an endorsement from that kind fellow, Mr. Gaiman.

I bought the black cover version of ‘Strange/Norrell’ (although now I wish I’d chosen the white, since it looks like all the book stores have black ones languishing on the shelves, although perhaps that means I’m in the minority and therwfore unique) and I’ve been reading it over the past month or so, off and on. There’s a bit too much Dickens in the first one hundred pages and I got the feeling at the end that it would have been a much better book if Clarke had taken the same level of emotional depth that comes out in the last four paragraphs of the book and applied it throughout the story. It is at times as interesting, compelling, tedious, and frustrating a book as I’ve read in a while. I enjoyed most of it for the most part, struggled through the muddy bits as best I could, and got very intrigued and compelled to finish in the last two hundred pages or so.

At the end, I wish she’d written a different book. One all about the Raven King — but, I suppose, that’s the point of Vinuclus’ secret.

Most importantly, I enjoyed it far more than any and all of the Harry Potter books. Dickens (and even the occassional drift into Austen) I can stomach on some level, providing there’s something happening below all of the posturing. Toffee-nosed young magicians in psuedo-Lewis pastiche leave me cold.

I bet that one of the nice things about being a Really Famous Writer is having people at the New York Times ask you to write Halloween fiction. Maybe someday…

Once I was done with ‘Strange/Norrell’ this morning, there was still a fair amount of time left before I really needed to start thinking about getting ready for work, so I cracked open the copy of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night that I found this weekend when Keeley and I went digging through the used section of Barnes and Noble.

I’m told that Paul Auster is a writer who get pedestalized (made up word) in grad school writing programs, which rankles me somewhat since I think he’s terrific and hate the thought of academics absorbing him into their pantheon (and thereby making him into another one of their hollow plaster saints).

But I’m liking the book. It’s a good book to read at 5 AM, sipping a cup of tea with a cat with no ears placed on your lap.

Yawn.

I’m up later than I should be tonight, gaining an hour one day while actually losing it the next. So I’m probably not making any sense and having nothing of substance to say — regular readers of this site will not recognize this as anything out of the ordinary.

And so, I’m off to scratch out a little bit of my own novel (the teakids are well out of the diner now and the chief villain has put in his first official appearance, thanks for asking) and then maybe a little more of Paul Auster before bedtime.

Or perhaps I’ll just say Good night…