On the most boring day ever, Christmas, I made a blog. Wonder if I'll keep up with it.
I dunno, seeing as this is called Reading in Bed (actually taken from a song title by Emily Haines) I should share with you some of my reading plans for 2009. Basically I want to read everything by Bret Easton Ellis. Don't know why, but I do. I think this'll be the beginning of a series of sorts... reading everything by one author and then moving on. I've started with Less Than Zero, of which I previously knew nothing other than what I learned from the movie incarnation from the late 80's (starring Robert Downey Jr and Andrew McCarthy *love*). So far that movie pretty much only shares the same title and characters with the same names. Maybe it was just a coincidence? The book isn't great, but it's good so far. The writing is very detatched and somewhat disorienting and confusing and a lot of times it gets on my nerves, but it works to help understand the situation Clay is trying to resolve. Ellis doesn't use imagery to bring a scene to life, but his words become claustrophobic when Clay is suffocating, forcing empathy in a way. While this is a really interesting approach to writing a novel, there are still lots to be desired. The characters seem really one dimensional, but maybe he did that on purpose. The way he describes things 'She is this, she is that, she does this, she danced, she kissed me, he looked tired, etc' could be another way of seeing things through Clay's eyes, only knowing people by their actions, having only one dimensional friends. Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit? I've still got like 40 pages to read so maybe it'll all come together at the end. And hopefully the rest of his books aren't written like that... my plan might end before it could really begin and this whole post about writing style as a kind of implied imagery would be totally wrong. Guess we'll see.
