Some very good books I haven’t finished, at least not yet (and why not), including John Darnielle’s This Year
Why wouldn’t a person finish a book? (How can we account for a DNF?)
I guess it’s often for the negative reasons you’d expect — at least for me it’s usually because of one or more of these: I don’t like the writing style, I don’t like the story, I can’t relate to the main character(s), I don’t like the genre, I don’t like the theme or subject, I’m not in the right frame of mind or I need something different right now, it’s too long, it’s too short.
But sometimes when I stop reading a book it’s actually a book I love. In those cases it’s almost always because it’s just too much of a good thing — maybe even absolutely perfect, but just too much.
And for me this happens most often with two types of books:
The first type is fiction — novels or more often short story collections — that have very dense and beautiful or very fresh thought-provoking prose or a lot of gigantic gripping ideas. With these, the writing demands so much attention and thought that I have to keep setting the book down to process, or because it set off my own imagination and I need time to work through my new ideas, or to sit down and do some of my own writing. These are often my favourite writers and my very favourite books, but like other cases of intense sensory overload, I can only manage small doses — which means it can take days to get through a few pages, and sometimes I don’t make it all the way to the end. (When the writing is especially intense, it can mean stopping less than halfway through, even quite a bit less. Some recent-ish luminous and mind-blowing examples: Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, and short fiction by Amber Sparks, George Saunders, and Kelly Link.)
The second type is nonfiction — and especially books about writing or doing other creative work.
This includes books that are shelved in the writing sections of bookstores and libraries, but in my experience some of the best “craft books” are actually memoirs, like Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. These aren’t books that tell you how to do anything, and sometimes they’re not even memoirs in the usual sense, more like their own flavour of creative nonfiction with autobiographical elements, but they shake something loose in the creative part of my brain, and they show me how someone else did it, in their own unexpected way.
And sometimes I’ve been very lucky, and the best of these have come along just as I’m feeling worn down by feeling that I’m doing everything wrong in my creative life, and reminded me that there are no rules.
This Year by John Darnielle
John Darnielle’s This Year is one of these. There’s a lot of autobiography here, in small snippets, brief and sometimes surprisingly revealing personal stories attached to each of the 365 songs in the book. I think there is a structure to this volume — and maybe if I sit down to read through it all at once a narrative shape would become obvious to me — but the way I’ve been reading it, picking it up for a few minutes at a time over months now, it’s more like walking past a river every so often, and occasionally reaching down into the water to pull out a different message in a bottle. And many of these messages are frankly startling, with observations or admissions that (to me at least) appear from nowhere and knock me off balance, and also make me intensely curious to know more: “I was sober by court order (random drug testing for the duration of a three-year suspended sentence; never tested dirty once, not that it was any of their business)….” (From the very second entry, for “Running Away With What Freud Said.”)
There are also plenty of musician-y revelations, even confessions, that will sound familiar to most of us people who play music, or try to: “I could not, at this time, sing and play the song while keeping the rhythm on that guitar consistent, a fact to which the recording bears extremely difficult, glorious witness.” (Accompanying the lyrics to “Wild Palm City.”)
Not surprisingly, there are stunning lyrics too, like these (from “Going to Alaska”): “…that the soil is soaked through with old blood and with relatives / who were buried here, or close to here…. / I am going to Alaska, where the animals can kill you / but they do so in silence, as though if no one hears them / then it won’t really matter. I am going to Alaska. / They tell me it’s perfect for my purposes.”
On top of all this, there are observations that are almost like those guest lectures from your student days, when a favourite poet or novelist said something to your class that made you stumble around campus for the rest of the day in a daze, rethinking your life, such as this (about “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life”): “Not the cars crashing but the person a block away who hears the crash. Not the fire but the way the room looked before the fire. Not the moment of the overdose, but the dozen things the man who overdoses, beloved by so many and with so much more to do in the world, will do, without thinking much about them, for the last time on that day.”
I could go on — about half of what I’ve read so far is marked with highlighter — and so far I’m only quoting from the first 5% of the book.
I know I’ll get back to This Year, but I don’t expect I’ll ever be able to read it any more quickly than I have been so far — or to use any less highlighter.
Notes
Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending John Darnielle’s This Year for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
