Florida is nice. At least as nice as I remember it. I haven’t been back in a year and a half and it’s still hot as hell. Humid. Mom told me that the twenty-seventh was probably the hottest day of the year. I can believe that. Eighty-four degrees and humid.

I’ve collected three new books so far: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. David McCullough’s 1776. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I started A Million Little Pieces last night and I’m tearing through it. It’s dark. And funny. I wonder why people pissed and moaned about Frey making up—embellishing?—parts of the book. It doesn’t change anything. It’s still a damn good book.

I found a stack of books I’d given to my mom several years ago and I wonder why she never read them. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Jonathan Franzken’s The Corrections. Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. There are a lot more, but I can’t remember, off the top of my head, what else was in the shelf. I’ll read The Crimson Petal and the White. I never finished it. I remember enjoying it so I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it. It had a very Dickensian feel to it. It’s one of those books that stays with you.

I haven’t been able to get back into Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. I’d misplaced it and wasn’t able to read it over the last two weeks. Maybe the time, at least for now, has passed. Or maybe it’s because A Million Little Pieces is so compelling that it overshadows any other books I’m reading. In any case, I’ll wait a bit before picking it up again. Maybe I’ll just start over. I didn’t get very far with it—seventy-five pages.

It’s so damn hot.

Proof that the Internet—and any semblance of a life—only takes away from your daily reading: in the last two weeks, I’ve raced through eight books. (It would’ve been ten if I’d bothered to finish Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot and Richard Laymon’s Island. I may still get back to them. I’m obsessive-compulsive when it comes to finishing books.) Impressive? Probably not, especially when I stop to consider that two of those books were picks for Oprah’s Book Club. But before you accuse me of selling out, let me defend myself by saying that, at the time, there wasn’t anything else to read.

And since everyone likes a list, no matter what’s being listed, here’s what I read. (I hereby allow you to mock some of my choices in the comments.)

• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow
• Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
• Midwives by Chris Bohjahlian
• The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman
• The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
• Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
• While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

I also set up my own domain—and, by extension, a new blog—today, but it hasn’t been finalized yet. Hopefully, it’ll go through within the next few days.

It’s good to be back, but it’ll be temporary: I may need to check into the hospital for a few days. But we’ll see how things go.

I’ll be on hiatus for the next two or three weeks, but don’t worry—I’ve gotten a very capable guest blogger to take over posting while I’m gone.

The London Review of Books has an interesting, if lengthy, essay on Samuel Beckett and the Irish actors who performed his plays onstage.

[Jack] MacGowran was a lead Irish actor who could hold the stage in the central plays in the Irish repertory. But these plays were few—notably the plays of Synge and Shaw and O’Casey, and perhaps O’Neill if you agreed that he was Irish—compared to the great canon of English theatre. The Irish plays from the beginning needed a peculiar sort of actor, who could manage anti-heroic material and offer it a sort of ironic heroic edge, who could play tramps, losers, and chancers but hold the stage with them knowing that there was no king or potentate about to arrive. They were the king and the potentate. The bare landscape or the poor tenement was Troy or Elsinore. In life, the characters they played held powerless parts and walk-on roles, but now for their brief stretch on stage they were, in some sour way, lords of language. This required playing of an unusual sort, crossing absolute realism with a strange poetic glow, allowing silences and sudden shifts of tone to work a magic, allowing a strange helplessness to hit against an unforced and peculiar majesty in attitude or tone, allowing comedy to play very close to pure sadness. These actors could play Eugene O’Neill with absolute ease, but they could not play Henry IV. Although MacGowran did not play any lead roles during his time in the Abbey, he watched the lead actors, steeped in the Abbey tradition, who had made the O’Casey and the Shaw parts from scratch, and he was locked now in the dilemma facing any Irish actor from this tradition in London. One moment he was playing Eugene O’Neill to great acclaim, and immediately afterwards he was in Hollywood for Walt Disney, playing a leprechaun in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. In the words of Derek Walcott, either he was nobody or he was a nation.

Ali Smith pays tribute to the “awesome spirit” of Katherine Mansfield, who lived fast, died young, and left behind a literary legacy that influenced a generation of writers, including T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Mansfield’s talent for social doubleness was little appreciated in the hothouse smallness of literary London. Lady Ottoline Morrell had begun to find her far too disquieting. The Bloomsbury Group agreed—she wore a mask, she was vulgar, she dealt in “lies and poses,” she was “inscrutable.”

“Indeed, everyone who was anyone put her down—Wyndham Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Gaudier-Brzeska—the list is endless … one wonders … why someone so gifted, so charming, should have been so universally detested,” Angela Carter later wrote.

I’ve been carrying Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red with me for quite some time, but it wasn’t until late last night that I got around to starting it. Now I’m wondering why I put it off for so long. It’s the kind of book that makes everything else a needless distraction—eating and sleeping don’t seem as important as reading. Even at four-thirty in the morning, with my eyes burning from exhaustion and my mind wandering, I was reluctant to set the book aside; I’d pondered brewing a pot of coffee and, in a marathon session, reading to at least page one hundred.

Alas, life calls and sleep is important—I’m having brunch with a friend and his family and I can’t be sulking through the day with bloodshot eyes and an irritable disposition.

I can say that, even though my “marathon” took me thirty pages into the book, My Name Is Red is damn good. It’s thoroughly engrossing and so far, better than Snow. And I have to chuckle a bit: like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the story is told from multiple points of view, with each chapter alternating between narrators. The book revolves around a group of painters—”miniaturists,” as they’re called in the book—whom the Sultan has commissioned to illustrate a book, inspired by the Venetian painters, glorifying his kingdom. The story brims with creativity—it opens with the murder victim (My Name Is Red is a mystery) describing what it’s like to be dead. Pamuk even tells one chapter (via a human storyteller) from the point of view of a Muslim dog. And the chapter, like the rest of the book, is a joy to read, with its tongue-in-cheek playfulness; Pamuk is winking at his readers, but there’s an undertone of seriousness to it.

I’m a dog, and because you humans are less rational beasts than I, you’re telling yourself, “Dogs don’t talk.” Nevertheless, you seem to believe a story in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn’t possibly know. Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

And that’s really what it comes down to: Pamuk entreats us to listen—if we know how—and to let go of all preconceived notions of what a novel can and can’t do and enjoy the story for what it is. And in Pamuk’s expert hands, that’s exactly what happens.

I finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying the other night and I don’t even know what to think of it. It’s a book that seems mired in contradiction: it’s funny, in a depressing way. There’s a story and a semblance of a plot, but it’s buried under Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness style. I really had no idea what was going on and the more I read, the confused I became, while earlier episodes started making sense. I liked it—but not really. It’s one of those rare books that completely fucks with your head, that leaves you wondering what the hell you just read.

I suppose As I Lay Dying isn’t really a novel so much as a collection of emotions. Faulkner jumps from character to character, with the book literally making you feel as though you were looking out from behind someone’s eyes. Seemingly random sentences—thoughts, in other words—crash together in a jumble. Characters aren’t often identified by name—and why should they be, when they already know each other?—so readers are left to puzzle out who is who based on behavior and speech patterns. Faulkner’s characterization is so true-to-life that reading the book can be stomach-churning—after all, who hasn’t known someone as stubborn as Anse, as impatient as Jewel, as naive as Dewey Dell, as two-faced as Darl? Indeed, what family isn’t as dysfunctional as the Bundren clan?

The genius of Faulkner’s novel—and the reason for all the ambivalence—isn’t because of the story (which is, admittedly, a comedy so black that any humor may be lost amidst the welter of tragedy), or the atmosphere of resigned helpnessness (as encapsulated by Tull’s statement that “[n]obody can’t guard against the hand of God”), but because of the characters. Faulkner probes the inner mind with all the subtlety of a doctor wielding a chainsaw. He doesn’t reveal his characters patiently—he screams, “Gotcha!” and rips the sheet off, exposing them in all their nakedness. And really, As I Lay Dying is so intimate that it’s almost like being violated—in forcing you to look at his characters, drawn in all their infuriatingly human glory, Faulkner forces you to look at yourself in the same light.

I’m a little late on this one, but it’s worth a mention: David Milofsky talks to T.C. Boyle, who was in Denver on Wednesday to accept the fourteenth annual Evil Companions Literary Award, which recognizes “authors who were either from the West or wrote about [the] region.”

… [D]espite his East Coast roots, Boyle claims to have particular fondness for Denver and is pleased to have won the Evil Companions Award. “It’s a pretty impressive group of winners,” he says. “And I’m honored to be part of it. But I’ve always liked Denver. I’ve been through there on virtually all of my book tours at the Tattered Cover and other stores, and I’ve really enjoyed performing there.”

He makes a point of saying he performs rather than simply giving a reading as most writers do. “Calling it a reading to me has this kind of half-baked academic quality,” Boyle says. “As if everyone is simply going to sit quietly and listen to me read out loud. Not very interesting. When I come to Denver I’m going to act out what I read and really give you a show. Literature isn’t like trigonometry, after all. The whole idea is to entertain. It’s a delight, subversive, free.”

This isn’t a lit-bit, but it’s hilarious: Jesus Christ has been getting in shape for the Second Coming.

“I can’t lead the armies of Heaven looking like some flabby slob,” said Christ, who declined to disclose His “before” weight. “That guy can’t be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. The faithful want a Messiah they can truly fear, not someone who’s afraid to take off His shirt in public.”

I’ve been a lazy reader this week. I’ve temporarily given up on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf—which, considering the nature of the book, probably isn’t surprising—and, despite my best intentions, I’ve pushed Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote to the side. (I’m moving to Florida next week, which is distraction enough, so I’ll pick up the thread in May, at the very latest.) And though I started William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying a few nights ago, I haven’t made much headway; it’s a challenging book in the sense that I went into it knowing next to nothing about it and was surprised to find that it requires all my concentration. Faulkner uses very broad brush strokes to paint the story and characters. Reading it is like trying to discern the landscape of a half-finished painting: certain details stand out, but the overall portrait is hard to discern.