The apocalyptic event that destroys the world of The Road is never identified. Whatever it is happens years before the book opens. McCarthy’s description of the moment it happens, as recalled in flashback by the main character, is a marvel of economy: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” A few sentences later: “A dull rose glow in the windowglass.” That’s it.

While on the planes to and from Florida the other week I make my way through Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. I suppose it also qualifies as a genre novel of sorts — a man and a boy, both nameless, struggling for survival as they wander through a number of devastated, ashen postapocalyptic landscapes. But this pared-down story line takes a back seat to the mesmerizing tone of the book, the language of it, the steady pulse of brief, strange, discontinuous passages, separated from each other by double returns, reading almost like prose poems, fading into the narrative for only a few beats at a time before fading out again. As though even the plot has been scoured away, leaving behind a story told solely through, in Eliot’s phrase, a heap of broken images.

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.

I finish the book and find it powerful and enthralling and unsettling, with a kind of terrible, harrowing quiet throughout. The elemental quiet of the world they travel through, the foreboding quiet of the story’s pace, the implacable quiet of the writing.

Some weeks ago I put aside my literary prejudices (and my stack of brain-fogging capital-L Literature) and pick up Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel His Majesty’s Dragon, jumping on the great bandwagon of geeks who are suddenly keenly interested in Novik after Peter Jackson announces that he’s optioned the book and its sequels for a possible movie. The Napoleonic Wars reimagined as being fought with air forces of dragons — a clever premise and not a bad book. A refreshing absence of knights or sorcerors or dungeons; an admirable avalanche of unexplained archaic military jargon; an endearing overuse of semicolons. Will soon be picking up the sequels…

Film-geek digression: If PJ ever gets around to making these books into a movie or movies, I’ll be interested to see how Weta Digital’s visual-effects geniuses handle the as-yet-insurmountable (c.f. Dragonheart) problem of creating believable talking dragons. How to make these gigantic creatures with toothy, reptilian, presumably lipless mouths appear to speak English (and French) realistically and quickly, without their mandibles flapping up and down as though they were immense Muppets? (Not that there’s anything wrong with immense Muppets. The Napoleonic Wars as fought with air forces of immense Muppets — I would buy a ticket to that movie.)

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Six:

For your possible edification: The low-fi, necessarily incomplete, increasingly outdated thumbnail gallery that I use for browsing through the UK/Canada Modern Classics covers. Much easier than combing endlessly through Amazons .co.uk and .ca. (Created earlier this year via a few minutes of grepping the text of a Penguin catalog PDF of Modern Classics ISBNs and plugging them into Amazon image URLs.)

Out of those 377 covers, here are 147 more-or-less favorites.

While we’re at it, because they were included at the end of the PDF, the typographically excellent covers for Penguin’s Great Ideas series.

We travel to southwest Florida for the weekend, visiting my parents, helping to entertain a tidal wave of relatives. At one point on Sunday I find myself examining the old, filled-up bookcases in the back corner of my parents’ garage, presumably kept out there enclosed in the hot damp Floridian air in order to encourage the books’ disintegration into swamp peat. I liberate a number of old paperbacks of interest. Four slim Richard Brautigan books — Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, Revenge of the Lawn, and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Lucy Herndon Crockett’s The Magnificent Bastards. A Viking Portable of Jonathan Swift. A Viking Portable of Boswell and Johnson. Penciled on the page-edges of the Swift is: SWIFT. Penciled on the page-edges of the Boswell and Johnson is: SAM.

Cake! (… or death?)

I spend the last evening of my twenties in perhaps the most perfect way possible: flipping back and forth between [Newly-Bought Book 1] and [Newly-Bought Book 2], inhaling great quantities of [Type of Wine] and listening to the horrifying slow electronic creep of [Musician] at his most ambient, rather loudly. Laura’s off at class. Fuck my twenties. Am relieved to be rid of them. What use is youth in pursuits misguided, all vainglory and heedlessly devouring? A solid decade of my appalling, excruciating, embarrassing, pretentious, poseurish, loserish, naïve, sad, stupid … somethings or other. Whatever it was I was, I’m not proud of it. Erase the lot of it. Finally over and done with, and good god-damned riddance. Sour-grape sentiment be fucked. Dear fortysomething SDH, circa Oct. 2016+: In advance, I hate you too. XOXO

James Richardson: If there is a calm after youth, it comes from not feeling less but from being able, sometimes, to decide when to feel, where in the mind to be.

From the Alt-Country Synchronicity Department: — Last night: We go into Toronto to see Hem perform at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen West. (Standing ten feet from the ten of them as they steamroll over us with a melodious hour-forty of old-timey melancholia.) — Tonight: We pick up Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and notice in the liner notes: all songs recorded at Wavelab in Tucson AZ … except for the intro to “John Saw That Number” which was recorded by Steve Chahley in the back stairwell of the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, Canada. — Awesome.

Several inches of snow over in Buffalo, I read. No snow here, aside from a few minutes this afternoon of big fat ugly wet snowflakes raining down like sodden confetti. I am imagining a vast warehouse-sized library or megabookstore whose floor-to-ceiling shelves display all their books face-out, the way movie-rental stores do, and wondering what it would look like. My Amazon.com books still have not arrived after two weeks … the bastards must have cottoned on to my frequent over-the-border ordering habits, and are now punishing me for it, making me wait three weeks instead of the usual eight days. Or is Canada Post to blame? Canada Post, pioneering the innovative four-day mail week. (They claim to operate Monday through Friday, but I can’t remember the last time we received mail on a Monday.) I phoned our apartment rep this morning to harass him over what he’s going to do about the maddening sound of dripping water inside our otherwise lovely apartment’s ceiling (condensation, we surmise); his voicemail greeting was still for Thursday and featured him saying I’ll be tied up in court all afternoon, but please leave your message…

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Five:

A caveat regarding my Penguin Modern Classics wall art: The cover images in and of themselves are not what appeal to me. If these images came merely in the form of individual photos or prints, without a book attached, I wouldn’t be interested. What interests me specifically are: 1) the combination of image and book, the fact that each image is an artful, spare representation of the literary work beneath it; and 2) having the book itself on display, as an object, which can later be removed and read.

However, I’m not so much into using individual books as art pieces, hung on the wall by themselves; rather, I’d only want to put book covers on the wall as elements in themed series. (As previously indicated.) That way, a large part of what’s on display are the associations I can create between the cover images — and, by extension, between the books themselves. (Also, it fills up more wall space. Horror vacui!)

My themed-series idea reminds me of something Rob Giampietro mentions in his Design Observer piece about the increasing trend toward shelving books by color:

Organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books’ content that even their authors did not.

What I’m doing is more or less a variation on this. Rather than arranging books by their spine colors, I’m simply using a different surface of the book. (This arrangement method doesn’t easily lend itself to bookcases, of course. Hence the wall.)

The tree I get to stare out the window at all day while I work has a fast fall. A full, luxurious head of green leaves last week. They turn a striking autumnal bright gold more or less overnight this past weekend. Then Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s cold, prolonged rain and gusting winds tear most of them off. The tree never seems to stop shedding. The lawn beneath it is now a golden-brown salad of dirty, sopping leaf-sludge. Did old Tunis plant this tree, back in 1891? The tree is tall, gaining on the building, almost to the top of the third floor’s roof spires. I am almost sure it is a European Ash. (Its scientific name sounds like a military motto — Fraxinus excelsior!) I know nothing about how fast trees grow. How tall would a 115-year-old ash be?

Hem’s “Not California”: And I’m the one who wants to be the one you’re with tonight…