You may have noticed from the sidebar that I’m “now reading” four different books:

• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov;
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard;
• Dhlagren, by Samuel R. Delaney;
• and the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman

Now, you may have said to yourself, “Hey Kyle, four books at one time? What the eff?”

First, let me say that I haven’t picked up Dhlagren in over a week. A couple of days ago, one of my friends asked how it was going, and I said “Good, but slow.” And that’s the truth. Dhalgren is very good, but it’s slow as all fuck.

The story is relatively simple. A man, who doesn’t know his name, crosses a bridge into an American city that’s lost to the outside world. The population is down to a couple thousand people at most, there is a constant haze of smoke from a fire that few remember the cause of, and gangs roam the streets as both terrorizers and protectors. The unnamed man walks around the city, having various adventures–mostly sexual in nature, but some less so–and experiencing psychotic losses of time. Like I said, it’s a good book, but slow.

Why is it a good book? Because rather than march directly at a determined point, Delaney’s language capers across of field of potential meaning; for example:

How jealous I am of those I have known afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear those moments before sleep when words tear from the nervous matrix and, like sparks, light what responses they may. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh those skeletal epiphanies with visual and aural coherence, if not rationale: better those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where either is merely a pain in the gut or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates both the sun and the heart.

Read that passage again. It’s pretty heavy, isn’t it? Perhaps even downright inscrutable? Do you see why I don’t pick up this book everyday? When I’m in the mood for it, when I’m in the mood for reading a dream, Dhalgren is perfect, but sometimes I just want to read a book.

Which is why, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up Lolita. I’m sure you’ve all heard of Lolita, and if not the book, then at least the line in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” that goes, “It’s no use, he sees her/He starts to shake and cough/Just like the old man in/That book by Nabakov.”

I’m thoroughly enjoying this book too. In fact, I just read about five pages of it while waiting for my computer to restart. The only reason I haven’t read it straight through is because just after I started it, I got a shipment of books in from Amazon (the first portion of this semester’s bibliography), and I picked up The Golden Compass, just to see what all the fuss has been about.

And when I say fuss, I mean it. People call the His Dark Materials trilogy the best fantasy books since The Lord of the Rings. I just had to check it out. And well, I haven’t put it down since. I’m not ready to weigh in on whether it belongs in the category of LOTR or The Chronicles of Narnia, but after reading about two-thirds of the first book, I’ll say that I haven’t read this swiftly since I followed Harry Potter on his final adventure.

As for the last book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I’m reading it as part of a book club here in Poultney-ville, so I’m only reading that when I need to be caught up for the next club meeting.

So that’s part of the reason I’m reading four books. The final reason is because I’m in the last stage of getting my own book done, and each of these four books speak to various aspects that I’d like in my novel, and by keeping my mind into all of them at once, I lessen the chances that my own voice will begin mimicking one.

Now it’s your turn. Tell us what you’re reading right now, and why. Believe me, we all want to know.