Specimen Days

I've had more chance to read these past weeks than I thought I would. I asked H if I should be worried that I was not concerned about having everything packed and cleaned and all the details ticked off the list. He assured me that everything is going along so smoothly that he is, in fact, getting bored.

Bags are 70% packed. Boxes and bags are mostly full waiting for last-minute items to toss in. We still need to finish cleaning, but some things cannot be cleaned until the last day or two.

So, we are reading. After the last Michael Cunningham book I read in July, I checked out his newest, The Snow Queen, but I could not finish it. It was short, but it felt to me as though he was more interested in writing beautiful prose than actually saying anything. Nevertheless, I thought I would give a previous book a go. 

I actually enjoyed Specimen Days. It's like Cunningham's The Hours in that it revolves around another classic piece of literature, this one Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The novel consists of three linked stories: one past, one present, one future. Characters continuously quote portions of Whitman's epic poetry collection. The first is a ghost story, the second a thriller, the third science fiction. A common theme is man vs. the machine and the state of humanity.