Finally

I finally completed Demonology by Rick Moody. I think the first few stories were really good, though a bit more traditional. By the final few though, the narratives broke down and he was getting experimental in a way I did not find a positive development, deconstructed into mutated growths I would hardly call prose let alone a story. Over all the first few stories definately make it worth reading, but more to pass the time then a must read.

But it was enough that now I want to read his other books like Garden State, but I don't think there is anything terribly new (at least, that is new in a positive way) or exciting about the more abstract stories.

Trouble is now I'm trying to decide what to begin reading. I have a text book-- The Story and Its Writer : An Introduction to Short Fiction that I got from Rutgers Bookstore over the summer. Its a great book to just pick up and read a story. It contains so many stories I feel no real obligation to read it from beginning to end as I would with a collection of short stories in a slimmer volume.

As a result I read a story by Martin Amis from the collection Einstein's Monsters entitled The Immortals. It was great, so I went ahead and read the first story from Heavy Water. This first story in the book was from the New Yorker, 1992 and focused on the poet as a rockstar and the screenwriter as a struggling artist, entitled Career Change. It was a nice little story, appropriate for the New Yorker.

But in either case, I'm still torn over what to read now. I still have a lot of Canterbury Tales left to read, and Heavy Water won't take more than a few days, hopefully, to finish off. I'm toying with the idea of starting Middlemarch, but I dont think I'll get through it before I temporarily give up reading for October. We will see.

Suggestions?