So much for my diligent quest. How do these picaros do it? I have been reading but "off list." Even brought four of the picaresque books back to the library unfinished: Sentimental Education, Witches of Karres, Augie March and Hotline Healers. I bought Diary of a Humiliated Man and am "diligently" reading it but it has lead me to conclude that a true picaro is more than naive: he is oblivious to the quest and not self-analyzing or interpretive. He becomes memorable to the reader simply because he is not self-promoting.
But on to how I'm spending my summer. Prolific JD Robb published two more "In Death" books while I was reading list books. So I devoured Kindred and Fantasy. While finishing Fantasy yesterday afternoon, I realized this recent diversion is solidly in the world of the fantastical. Besides these futuristic mysteries, I've read three Jasper Fforde's: two from the the nursery rhyme crimes -- The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear -- and the Eyre Affair introducing Thursday Next. Fforde's books through me back to the summer of (well let's not give the exact year) when I was about 11, knocking off a Nancy Drew a day.
Both Robb and Fforde expect the reader to eagerly enter their make-believe worlds and suspend all other logical checks on reality. Both prevent reader-vertigo by anchoring the plot with oblique reference to things that are real. Robb has the stories in NYC, post Urban Wars in the 2050s and beyond, but with enough vestiges of the City's geography and exaggeration of New Yawker characteristics to make the hypothetical plausible. Fforde works a complicated conceit of detectives devoted to literary crime, some forgery but more animation of classic fictional protagonists. Because the original novels' heroes and heroines were depicted so accurately and passionately, they almost seemed real, the first time around, so the reader willing suspends belief to see them active again in a new setting. Fforde's books are punctuated with quotes and references to an English major's delight, but "fun" enough to lure new pre-teen adventurers.
My final fantasy from the past couple of months is another genre I default to when all temptations are yielded to; namely vampires, reading Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Like Fforde working over Jane Eyre, Grahame-Smith reworks Abe's rise within politics, the debates, the War, and his assassination, all this primary Americana, with a sinister overlay of a penultimate motive of vampires control, all with photo-shopped pictures.
And I finished the Millennium trilogy reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, paying more attention to the latest hunt to see if there really is any page in the tome where Larsson doesn't mention coffee. Of the three, Dragon Tattoo I rank first, with this one second.
So, besides my eavesdropping into the humiliated man's mind, I have only "off list" books piled up to delve into. I think this year's choices have been a bust and am already toying with themes for 2011. How about books with a one word title? Or books exclusively from one city or country? What's your ideas, Slackers?
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