Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the seventh public domain book I’ve worked on. It’s the first that I didn’t choose. This was Mallory’s choice. It seemed like a no-brainer. It’s set in Chicago. It’s angry about the state of the country. It’s about immigrants. The thing I didn’t take into account or forgot about was what a poor stylist Sinclair is.

Perhaps this shouldn’t matter so much in a book that was clearly meant as agitprop and succeeded as such. How many books can you name that changed government policies? But the way a book is written matters to me. I’ve quit on new books after a paragraph because I couldn’t see going on with a thing that contained this sentence or that phrase.

I first read The Jungle many years ago. Don’t ask how many because I couldn’t begin to guess. Definitely after I moved to Chicago, which narrows it down to the last thirty-five years. All I can recall is being interested in the description of the slaughterhouses and immigrant living conditions and put off by the Communist harangue at the end.

Working on it now, I find myself reading a sentence or two, then skipping ahead. I’m looking for images to render and luckily for me there are no shortage of them. Many include animals in living and dead states, in groups or in parts. I’m not worried about finding enough material to fill the book but don’t know how I feel about this half-reading strategy. With the previous six in the series, I read and re-read and often listened via audiobook. This time I’m engaging as little as I can. Just enough to do the work.

I’m currently at twenty drawings and expect to make at least twenty more. While drawing, I listen to podcasts and music. Nothing to do with The Jungle. To be fair, that was my approach with the other books as well. The immersion in the text stops the moment my pen or brush touches paper. It helps to have my mind on something completely different while making these images, strangely enough. It’s something like critical distance even as my goal is a kind of informal immediacy. This is difficult to explain but mostly true of my process, whether illustrating or making standalone art.

The juggling of near and far, aware and aloof, is the constant wrestling match of creating anything. So maybe the fact I can barely stand to read more than a couple of Sinclair’s paragraphs at a go will make the final result better? I have to hope so. All I know is that I will be through with it in the next month or so. Bill has promised to send me his intro soon, so, after that the thing will be formatted and filed away till its release next fall.

I’m also making painted illustrations for a Chicago calendar book that should come out at roughly the same time. It’s a good counterbalance to The Jungle. No bad feelings at all. Just image searches and painting.

Simple.

I’ll be reading something about the bookstore at Tuesday Funk tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see you there. A couple of the other readers have books that I’ve shelved in the past few weeks. I’ll have to tell them.