Oh wait…I forgot.

I really thought I’d like The Night Circus, and I did, to a certain extent. I just couldn’t get through it. First of all, I’m bad at pop fiction. That’s usually because of those authors’ horrible style. Erin Morgenstern‘s style isn’t nearly as bad as Charlaine Harris‘s, for example. (Note: I use Charlaine Harris as an example of the worst kind of writing.) I think that the main reason that I couldn’t finish it is that it’s written in present tense, which, for whatever reason, I find incredibly distracting. I wanted The Night Circus to be something like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, which I loved, but it’s not. It is about two dueling magicians in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it’s also a love story. And the present tense. At the beginnings of sections of chapters, she even uses second-person POV, which is interesting. Those parts work because they’re short: it’s like you’re experiencing the circus for yourself, and it’s a magnificent one. I just couldn’t get beyond the present tense. And the story seems to go on forever. It’s slow in some of the same ways that Jonathan Strange can seem, but Jonathan Strange kept my attention – and it’s twice as long as The Night Circus.

Part of it, too, was that I knew I didn’t really have time to finish it. I got to the halfway point very slowly because of various things going on right now (moving!), and I absolutely have to be book-free tomorrow morning because my very favorite author, Haruki Murakami, has a new book coming out tomorrow, 1Q84, which I must begin reading as soon as it pops onto my Kindle. Or my head will explode, or something.

So: it’s not that The Night Circus is a bad novel – in fact, I think it’s a pretty good one – it’s that the style doesn’t fit my personal preference, and I started reading it without figuring out how long it is first. I’d still recommend it if you really liked Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Several years ago, I dated a guy whose mother so often said that Kevin Costner was originally cast in Patrick Swayze’s role in Ghost, that her sons came up with a gesture to express it more succinctly: they would simply touch their index fingers to their foreheads. I need to come up with similar gesture for my usual excuse of waiting too long after I’ve read a book to write about it. Or I could just abide by my general rule of posting about the book I’ve just read before I begin the next, though that idea doesn’t seem to be working for me too well. So maybe I’ll raise my hands above my head and cough.

Anyway. About a week ago, I finished The Book of Sand, my second Borges collection. This time it was all fiction, which was a plus, though, in general, I enjoyed Labyrinths much more. I felt challenged and entranced throughout the short stories in Labyrinths, but I found myself a bit bored with The Book of Sand.

The only story I really like in this collection is “The Book of Sand,” which is about an infinite book. A bible salesman appears at the protagonist’s door, offering to sell him a book with no beginning or end. As you turn to the back of the book, more and more pages appear, and the same thing happens when you try to find the front. Pages also continually change in the middle.  The protagonist (who calls himself Jorge Luis Borges) buys the book, becomes obsessed with it, and realizes that it’s a curse, so he does his best to get rid of it.

There are a couple more good stories, like “The Mirror and the Mask” and “The Disk,” but I didn’t see any comparable to one like “The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths, which just might be one of my favorite stories ever.

I still love Borges, of course, but I hope that most of his work (that I haven’t read) is more like Labyrinths than The Book of Sand, though I guess they’re both the same type of thing. One of the blurbs on the back of the book compared it to Labyrinths, but it’s certainly not as good.

I finished the second of my three term papers yesterday, a day ahead of schedule, so I declared today a Mental Health Day and spent a good chunk of the day at Starbucks finishing Libra, the fourth novel of my Don DeLillo Binge. I had a hard time getting through this one because it’s a historical novel, and I don’t like historical novels. It’s about Lee Harvey Oswald and conspiracy theories and things (as Jacob says, SPOILER ALERT: he dies at the end). Lots of FBI and CIA people lurking about. It’s not exactly my kind of novel.

DeLillo is a brilliant novelist, though, and even though I wasn’t interested at all in the subject matter, his writing is fantastic, and that makes up for a lot. Here are a couple of snippets I particularly liked:

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world…I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hearus in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.

Well, that’s about it. Libra definitely isn’t White Noise. But he did call Bossier City “a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost” (!) and Dallas “the city that proves God is really dead.” Those were the best two parts of the whole damn novel. And there’s the disturbing description of Jackie Kennedy crawling over the back of the car in which her husband has just been shot trying to recover a piece of his skull. Every time I mention that description, someone tells me it really happened. I know.

And that’s about all I have to say about Libra. It’s not bad or anything – I just didn’t like it. I think it’s better-written than Falling Man. Next up is Americana, DeLillo’s first (published?) novel. I have no idea what it’s about, and that makes me happy. I’m going to do my best not to read the blurb on the back. I’ve decided to tackle the rest of the novels in the order they were published, though if I get too close to the end of the summer before I get to Underworld, I’ll skip to that one because it’s so damn long.

Oh, how I love Don DeLillo.