i'm a very very complex person

I finally finished Speak, Memory. As I mentioned last time, it did get more exciting toward the end, but I still wasn't that impressed with it. Nabokov just let his memory wander and put down whatever came to mind. It's an interesting concept, but it didn't work that well in execution.

Also, I attended the first meeting of the book club that I mentioned. I'm actually excited about it. It's an interesting group of people, and I think I will still be able to do non-book-club related reading, which was my biggest concern. We're going to read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire as our first book.

I haven't started it yet, but I did start reading Valencia by Michelle Tea, which I wound up borrowing from my book club friend. She loved it and recommended it highly, but I have to admit that I'm not that impressed. It's the possibly semi-fictionalized account of the author basically "dropping out" of society in San Francisco. She never keeps jobs, she lives in nasty little apartments, she does lots of drugs, sleeps with lots of women, is constantly drunk, and somehow seems to think that this makes her hip, political, and edgy. I don't know. Saying this makes me feel awfully judgmental and square, but it all seems rather self-indulgent to me. Nonetheless, it's pretty light, and I'm whipping through it fairly quickly. I think it's the kind of book that I'm most likely to remember as a momentary diversion between books that I read "for real".

I'm still reading Speak, Memory, and it's going pretty slowly. Nabokov is, of course, an absolute genius, and his incredible intelligence and wonderful writing are evident in this book, but it nonetheless lacks the power of his novels. I think this problem stems from the lack of narrative structure in the book. He seems to be relating his memories with no particular plan, simply putting down whatever comes into his mind next. While this is probably a fairly accurate representation of the way that memory functions in reality, it doesn't make for very compelling reading. Also, the fact that the book is non-chronological can also be somewhat confusing, although I don't think the lack of chronological structure would bother me so much if some other structure or guiding principle were evident. My other complaint is that Nabokov is spending too much time on his early childhood. It's certainly interesting to get a glimpse into what it was like to grow up in Russia at the turn of the century, but after a hundred pages about country estates, pranks he pulled with his brother, and various governesses who cared for them, I think I've gotten the picture! I'm ready to read about his exile from Russia, his mature life, the writing of his books! But the book shows no sign of moving on to those things any time soon... It's certainly not a bad book, I'm just finding it somewhat disappointing after having such high expectations of it. But I'll stick with it, hopefully it will improve once he grows up a little bit.