A few unrelated notes ...
I keep telling myself not to start any books until my stack of "currently reading" books has shortened. I've been chipping away at David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest since June (the end result being the funniest book I've ever read) and, more recently, Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I haven't read in ten years. Dracula is scary in parts--I've had a few bizarre, erotic nightmares--but, ten years ago, I wasn't impressed with it as a novel, and my opinion hasn't changed.
I haven't made much of a dent in Ian Kershaw's Hitler--even with six hundred pages excised from the original two-volume biography, this is still a big book. What's interesting, though, is the way Hitler makes you realize how little we really know about Adolf Hitler. When Kershaw strips away the Nazi propaganda and speculation surrounding Hitler, you're left with an unexceptional and lazy Austrian who, were it not for World War I, probably would not have achieved obscurity.
Then I started Stephen Marche's Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a book I disliked so much that I read it almost to the exclusion of everything else, simply to finish it. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea has its moments--I enjoyed the story "Flotsam and Jetsam"--but even for a fictional anthology, the book is maddeningly half-baked. It's hard to pinpoint what Marche was trying to accomplish with this novel.
And last night, I started William Shakespeare's The Tempest and finished the first act feeling exhausted; even by Shakespeare's standards, this is a difficult play. But the difficulty, I've realized, doesn't necessarily stem from the language. Shakespeare's plots are very fast-paced. The Tempest, like most of Shakespeare's plays, begins after a lot of the action has already occurred, or, at the very least, after most of the important decisions have been made.
