I start too many books. I start reading them, get part if the way in, and then am attracted by the next shiny object, a new (to me) book, that draws my attention away. Sometimes, like today, I realize how unmanageable this habit, this vice, is.
I was reading The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks by Richard Stoneman this morning when I realized that if I continue along this path, I will never finish it. I’m deep in Stonemen’s description of Megastheses’ book Indica
Megastheses was an ambassador from Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya. Seleucus fought a war against Chandragupta in 305-303 BCE, lost, and sent Megasthenes to negotiate an alliance. (Chandragupta got to marry one of Seleucus’ daughters, and gave Seleucus 500 war elephants.) Megasthenes kept notes of his embassy and wrote his book, which is now lost. We know of it because Megasthenes is quoted in so many subsequent Greek and Roman books. I’m starting to realize that unless I clear my table, I will never progress beyond Megasthenes in this history. And I feel a nagging moral sensation that the only way to free up time to complete this book is to finish some of these other books! (I call it a “sensation” rather than a “belief” because I don’t really believe it. My conscous mind thinks that it is perfectly OK not to finish books. But the nagging mom deep in my brain says “no—finish those books!”)
Like for example, I’m about halfway done with Crossroads by Jonthan Franzen. I enjoy his writing very much, and I am loving this family saga, but would my life be lessened in any meaningful way if I didn’t finish it? Not really.
Related to the first book on this list (although probably mentioned near the end of Stoneman’s history) is The Milinda Panha, a Buddhist text that is part of the Pali Canon. It purports to be a dialogue between a king, Milinda, and a monk, Nagasena, about Buddhism. It was written sometime between 100 BCE and 200 CE. Milinda converts to Buddhism as a result of this encounter. The dialogue consists of a series of highly spiritual brain-teasers. It turns out that we know who Milinda was, that he was not a mythological or legendary figure. He was the king of the Indo-Greek kingdom, which existed as a distinct polity for a couple of hundred years from about 200 BCE to 1 CE. His Greek name was Menander. The Indo-Greeks were sort of the last gasp of Greek eastward expansion after Alexander’s death. I’ve barely started The Milinda Panha and it is kind of a tough slog: the monks who recorded it expressed themselves in a very formal way.
This one, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, I hope is a little easier than The Milinda Panha. Fernando Pessoa (1988-1935) is Portugal’s quiet entrant into the “greatest modernist author” sweepstakes. An unbelievably eccentric author, he wrote under something like 80 “heteronyms” (which is what Pessoa called his pseudonyms). His “heteronyms” wrote in different literary styles and had different focuses for what they wrote. They all had their own biographies, which sometimes intersected with the biographies of other heteronyms. (Some of them wrote in English and French, as well.) I say this as if it were something that the Portuguese reading public were aware of, but Pessoa barely published his literary work during his life—it was mostly discovered after his death. His whole system of heteronyms existed mainly in his head. Scholars have been trying to work out a taxonomy of Pessoa’s alternate literary selves ever since. I’ve always been intimidated by his massive poetic output, so I thought this anthology of prose pieces might be a little easier to tackle.
Next up is another relatively recent work by a lesser-known European writer, Species of Spaces and other Pieces by Georges Perec (1936 to 1982). I think all the pieces within were written during the 60s and 70s. Perec is best-known for the novel Life: A User’s Manual as well as La Disparition (the title of which is translated to A Void). This latter novel was written without the letter “e”. In my mind, this makes Gilbert Adair’s English translation an even more impressive intellectual feat. Both of these books are delightful, so I have high expectations from this collection
Texas the Great Theft is by Carmen Boullosa. I have no idea why I picked this up. Partly it may have been because I am curious about how Mexicans feel about Texas. It is set in a slightly fictionalized border region. Brownsville here is called Bruneville and Matamoros is hilariously named Matasánchez. The time is 1859, and the Mexicans of the border exist uneasily with the gringos and native-Americans. A gringo lawman hits a Mexican landowner, starting a rumor that quickly flies in all directions—towards Mexico, towards Indian lands, among the gringos. And that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. The way Boullosa describes the spread of this bit of gossip is very humorous. It was published by an amazing small publisher in Dallas called Deep Vellum
.The only graphic novel on the list is Time Zone J by Julie Doucet. It is bizarre that a graphic novel should be hard to finish. It’s not that I dislike reading it—this one is enjoyable. But I have deliberately read it one WC visit at a time, which makes my progress inevitably slow. I suspect I will finish in the next couple of days, at which point I will reread it. Julie Doucet is one of the great cartoonists to emerge since the 80s. She is from Montreal, and did a series for a few years called Dirty Plotte. Sometime around 2006, she stopped drawing comics. The reward given the amount of work required was not sufficient, apparently. I’ve often suspected it might have something to do with the overwhelming male-ness of the comics world. This book is sort of a come-back for her, and I have to say that it is a completely unexpected experiment. The story being told by the words (which are Julie’s telling of a love affair she had as a young woman with a French soldier) but the images are almost completely unrelated to that story. Describing it makes it sound like a reader-unfriendly experiment, but the surprising thing is how much I ended up drawn into both the art and story. I can’t wait to read it again.
These are a few of the books that my little demon is forcing me to finish. The more I think about them, and write about them, the more I want to complete them.
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It's a relief to know I may not be so unhealthy in my tendency to be in the middle of several books at once. (Of course, your piece doesn't explicitly make that reassurance, but it makes me feel better anyway.)