Mediocre Books

I’m afraid of flying.

I wouldn’t say I have a phobia of flying, because a phobia is supposed to impair your functioning, and while some people might say that taking a twelve hour greyhound bus down the eastern seaboard when you can afford to fly is dysfunctional, I prefer to think of it as character building. And when there’s no way to avoid flying, I do it. Like this past month, when I flew to California and then to Florida. I took four flights - six, if you count connecting flights.

To calm my anxiety, I do two things. I eat outrageous amounts of gummy bears, which are my favorite comfort food. And I read novels. I try to find the most engrossing, pulpy novels I can. I read five novels over my four flights, but unfortunately, none were as compelling as I hoped.

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand was a beautiful book - full of deep world building and casual lyricism - but the wrong kind of book to read in flight. Delaney, the author, does some very interesting things with gender and sexuality, as well as with family structures. But the central narrative is rambling, detached, and not particularly moving. It’s a good book, but not a good story, if that makes sense.

The Forever War I found unremarkable. The writing is tight, the scene-setting is well done though not especially original, and the main character is sympathetic even as he does some pretty unsympathetic things. But I think that in the end, this is more of a war novel with a science fiction aesthetic than the reverse. And I’m not a huge fan of war novels. Though I’m a pretty voracious reader of non-fiction accounts of war - I prefer my stories of horrific violence to be as non-narrative and non-romanticized as possible. So this book didn’t work for me, but for a different kind of reader I imagine it very much would.

At this point, I switched out of the sci-fi genre and into contemporary fiction, in the hope that it would be more satisfying.

Saturday takes place over the course of a single day - a Saturday, of course. Almost necessarily, the book is full of digressions - memories and self-reflections and daydreams of the main character. It was an interesting way to approach a story, and it resonated very well with the events of the book, during which the main character’s intellectualism and remoteness is a source of conflict. But it was hard to get into. There are only a few moments throughout the day in which anything is at stake, and even those moments are dragged down by the continual focus on the main character’s interior world.

Summerland is less experimental/speculative than the other novels, and I picked it off the shelves of an airport news stand precisely for this reason. The story revolves around a set of three families dealing with the aftermath of a car accident in which one child was killed and another permanently injured. While it’s easy to sympathize with the characters’ pain, I don’t think the author builds very interesting characters. The only two which stuck out for me - the teenage Demeter, who helped cause the accident, and depressed Ava, the mother of the boyfriend of the deceased character - were treated pretty poorly by the narrative. It didn’t help that Demeter, the only fat character, was portrayed as unpopular, self-loathing, and constantly eating. And the ending of the novel was a bit trite. This was probably my least favorite of the books I read.

Finally, The Shadow of the Wind, a book which I’ve heard good things about but which ultimately fell flat for me. I enjoy a murder mystery as much as anyone else, but there’s something self-consciously literary about this book that kept me constantly aware that I was reading a piece of fiction. It seemed, in its content and ambitions and historical setting, like an inferior version of The Name of the Rose (which I thought was incredible. See, I do like books!)

So, there you have it. Four half-recommendations and a non-recommendation. I think next time I fly, I’ll make sure to do my research and bring some better books with me.