Danielle Steele or F. Scott Fitzgerald? Needful Things or One Hundred Years of Solitude?
This week, I turned the final page of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. As usual after finishing a classic book, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction… and disgust with my own reading level.
I’d read the book during my 45-minute train commute and sometimes the pages would fly by like the scenery– and then I’d hit yet another block of long description. The riverboats! Another passage about Florentino’s ridiculously improbable stalker-love! Another paragraph of lovingly translated lyricism about the mundane, which after a few sentences appears to my eyes as “blah blah blah.” And I’d have to put the book down and stare out the window.
I’d like to be worthy of Marquez’s literary achievement in this book and take note of each brilliant subtlety in the text. However, I’m a child of my generation: fighting the slowly brewing ADD that’s taking root in our collective consciousness. Every time I slammed into yet another antiquated Block O’ Description, I had to fight the urge to give up this whole classic literature nonsense and turn to video games.
This was a literary gem, triumphant and sparkling, and deserving of all the positive adjectives greater critics than I have used to describe it. But every chapter I completed was a hard-won victory over short attention span and impatience with the old-world habit of taking as many words as necessary to describe a commonplace thing, and now I’m left with one desire: to sit down with a nice graphic or teen novel. Rutgers English department, please forgive me.
In the meantime, I’ve been taking a break before starting The Zombie Survival Guide to work on polishing off a book I started a few months ago but never finished, Al Franken’s Oh, the Things I Know! A Guide to Success, or, Failing That, Happiness. It’s more of a pamphlet in the Thomas Paine sense of the word, and widely unread as it is not one of his more popular political books like 