When the Block Breaks: The Book List

Finally, a book list! Here it is, the fourth month of the year, and I’m only starting to write up a book list for 2008. How shameful and shocking.

We start of the year with a minor commentary on Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story, which I finished yesterday afternoon at my desk (tells you how busy I am). As far as Stephen King goes, the book is less horror and gore than psychological exploration. The focus is the relationship between Scott and Lisey Landon, married for 25 years before Scott dies. Scott is a famous novelist, critically acclaimed and devoured by the masses. Lisey is his ever-present if silent wife throughout his career, which belies her more accurate role as not only his friend and lover, but his anchor in this world.

Two things were the most striking in this book: yes, there was a madman; yes, there was a monster. However, they are almost periphery to the understanding of Scott’s sometime tenuous hold on reality and the devotion and dedication between Lisey and Scott. Deep relationships have an interiority that no one outside of that membership can understand, but the depth of interiority is easy to recognize if you have experienced (or are experiencing, I would say) that kind of intensity of understanding. How Lisey figures into Scott’s alternate world, and how she comes into her own in using, manipulating and being terrified of that world, cement the bond between them even after his death. Unlike Scott, Lisey has the ability to forget what she has seen (Dana Scully, anyone?) until it is absolutely required of her in order to save herself or Scott. Resourcefulness and intelligence are Lisey’s strengths even if, when we are introduced to her, she seems little more than a tired widow whose only role in life was to hold the awards, certificates, and little tokens given to her husband at events. Lisey holds so much more of Scott, and that’s where King does an excellent job. I like to think that it’s probably a weirdly sweet reflection of the kind of understanding that there is between King and his own novelist wife; I know that I recognized the wavelengths on which IP and I travel within the book – faint, of course, because neither of us can teleport to beautiful otherworldly places, but it’s easy enough to see that Lisey and Scott are best friends in the sense that I see myself and IP to be. Lisey and Scott can share their very selves without fear of judgment or rejection. That’s, to be very plain, important.

The book can be eerie, though. Whether based in the sad reality of murderous insanity or when describing another world that goes sour and evil as the sun goes down, King does deliver an unsettling atmosphere even if this book doesn’t give you outright scary moments (go to Pet Sematary or ‘Salem’s Lot for those thrills). The acts of violence of this world and the scary monsters of the other, though, crumble under the weight and force of Lisey and Scott as a whole. Both are threatening and have the legitimate power to destroy, and do inflict damage, but ultimately fail.

Wow, I actually finished a book list entry (I have started a few for the other books I have read this year, but this is the only one to be completed). I am currently reading David McCullough’s 1776 and am awaiting the arrival of a few new books from Barnes and Noble. Hopefully this entry gets me out of the reading and book blogging funk in which I’ve been.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

1) Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germanyby Steven E. Ozment
2) Women at the Beginning – Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Maryby Patrick J. Geary
3) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
4) A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts by Robert Bolt
5) Lisey’s Story by Stephen King

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) 1776 by David McCullough
2) Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes by Eamon Duffy
3) The Aeneidby Virgil (Translation by Robert Fagles)

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Boyfriend, or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) The Savage Detectives: A Novelby Roberto Bolaño (Translation by Natasha Wimmer)
2) The Pillars of the Earthby Ken Follett
3) The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs
4) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks