I haven't referred to any lists for my holiday reading this
time around. I have started with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Not a pleasant start.
The movie itself was so terrifying. I don't really chase and watch any of those
"horror movies", but The Road disturbed me more than any movie I had seen. Perhaps, as Sherlock Holmes said, you feel horror when a situation
kindles your imagination. In A Study in Scarlet, when Watson was upset by one
murder, he who has seen so many in the battlefields, Holmes says:
“I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.”
I wonder how I would have felt reading The Road, if I had
not seen the movie. McCarthy is a brilliant writer. I was tempted to read
McCarthy because of the late Roger Ebert. In many of his reviews and blog posts
he talked about McCarthy which made me curious. Read his post Perform
a concert in words where he talks about how McCarthy's Suttree influenced
him. Perhaps this blog post of his might turn out to be my holiday reading list!
I have also started reading Neil Young's autobiography (or
let's say, journal) Waging Heavy Peace,
which is the reason for posting this. In fact, I am also listening to his
latest album Psychedelic Pill side by side. The album works well as a companion
CD to the book. In the book, Young writes a lot about his passions which have turned into entrepreneurial initiatives, like the studio quality music player
Pono and his hybrid car engines. In the
album opener "Driftin' back" which runs for 27 minutes, he expresses
the same sentiments ("I don't want my mp3"). Young is not trying to
be a great literary writer with this book, he has written the passages very
casually - you can find the word "cool" every now and then - which is interesting,
as he is an amazing song writer (But me I'm not stopping there/Got my own row left to hoe/Just another
line in the field of time - from Thrasher).
Neil Young's father was a writer. When he was a child, his
father told him "Just write every day, and you will be surprised what
comes out". I am following that advice too. Hence this post.
H/T: E's flat
blog for the Holmes anecdote.
