Summer Reading #5

Freedom, being one of the most eagerly awaited novels of 2010, has already been reviewed all over the place, so I don't have much to add to all of that. If you've stopped by before, you may know that I'm a bit of a Franzen fangirl (a Franzgirl?), although I think I have greater enthusiasm for his essays than his novels, which is not to say I dislike his novels at all.

Once again, Franzen has successfully, painfully captured human beings' scope for truly banal unhappiness, and if this ending is anything to go by, I think it's starting to get to him. I suppose it must be difficult to be a bird enthusiast without cultivating at least some sense of hopefulness, in something. In The Discomfort Zone, Franzen describes the propensity for bird watching to transform into a competitive sport (which may have some bearing upon the nature of familial and conjugal interactions in Freedom), but surely it is also, ultimately, an optimistic pastime?

Considering that, then, perhaps my conclusions about Freedom are unfair. Am I alone in thinking that in the last quarter of the novel, some punches were unsatisfactorily pulled? Should I try to be more open to the pure, unadulterated joy of catching a glimpse of an almost-endangered warbler in the wild?

Beaucoup Bad Shit - Summer Reading #4

If you recall, this was my re-read for the summer. I first read this book in high school, I think I was 15 or 16, and as usual I remembered almost nothing about it except that I lapped up every page. I was curious - the premise is not one that I imagine appealing to me now, but I wondered if my teenage self was really onto something, and a muggy, tropical summer stuck in the city seemed like the perfect time to read about a commune dwelling in a hidden tropical paradise.

The verdict? At about 100 pages, I think I told my better half, "I can't tell if I like it or not, but I am enjoying it." I'm not sure if that actually means anything, but it seemed to make sense at the time. Now, having just finished the book, I can say, yes, I did like it. I liked it a lot. I haven't been able to look away from it and have consumed it within a couple of days.

The backpacker thing is... well, I don't know. I couldn't help but think, isn't this a bit of wild, adolescent, orientalist fantasy? It's hard to argue otherwise, but Garland absolutely knows it. There's a great scene, pretty early on, where Richard (our narrator) and Keaty (another inhabitant of the beach) discuss the notches in their backpacks:

He lit up. "Got a favourite?"
I thought for a couple of moments. "It's a toss up between Indonesia and the Philippines."
"And your worst?"
"Probably China. I had a lousy time in China. I went for five days without talking to one person except when I ordered food in restaurants. Terrible food too."
Keaty laughed. "My worst was Turkey. I was supposed to stay for two months but I left after two weeks."
"And the best?"
Keaty looked around, inhaling deeply, then passed me the joint. "Thailand. This place. I mean. It isn't really Thailand, considering there's no Thais, but... Yeah. This place."

And there aren't any Thais, apart from the armed men who guard the marijuana fields on the other side of the island, and they are really only a plot device. It's a kind of wayward, middle-class, white people fantasy land, and look how horribly wrong it goes. Lord of the Flies, but with career backpackers and a shitload of drugs.

Though I might dislike more or less every single character (including Richard, who starts off as unbelievable, boring on the page but an intrepid adventurer in his own mind), I was completely sucked in, I had to know where they were going to end up (my terrible memory again). I can't resist an unreliable narrator, and Richard is a great example. Mr Duck, Vietnam... the line between reality and pure fantasy is pretty opaque in this universe. And the ending - spoiler alert, kind of - do you think they actually made it back? Can you return to The World, after all that?

A trivial afterthought - I was plagued by the thought that these people spent months, years, on this island without a single book. Isn't that the first thing you would take? Wouldn't you spend months and months re-reading the same novels over again, indiscriminately, until the next run to the mainland brought back some new treasure? Perhaps reading novels not set on the beach would be too great a reminder of the outside world, thoughts of which all characters are eager to banish. If that's the way things roll in this tropical paradise though, you can count me out!

Summer Reading #2 and #3

Of course, that week off between Christmas and New Year flew by far too quickly, and the long, uninterrupted days of reading I dreamed of didn't actually eventuate. I'm back at the office now so reading time is limited to the morning train ride and the lunch hour, and the odd session of an evening if I can keep my brain awake.


That hasn't been too much of a challenge as I've been tearing through Justin Cronin's The Passage, and it is only my wimpiness at the thought of imagined zombie vampire nighttime attacks that has stopped me from staying up til dawn, reading. As often happens, I only learned that there is sequel when I was about 500 pages in, but I'm glad I was mentally prepared for the cliffhanger, because... goddamn. Mr Cronin, I don't mean to rush you, but please have mercy and write that sequel QUICKLY!

Over the break I also managed to cross off The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It befuddled me for the first 150 pages or so, but then something changed in the book or in my brain and I couldn't stop reading. There may have been a tear or two at the end. *Ahem*. Diaz is a total gangster, I'd love to read more of his writing. To say that someone is a musical writer usually implies that they write lyrical, expressive prose that rolls off the page like a Beethoven sonata. Diaz is a musical writer, but his musicality is more like NWA. If you are thinking of partaking of a bit of Oscar action yourself, I recommend this website for those of us not entirely down with the Marvel universe, Tolkien, or, among other things, Dominican slang.

The holiday might be over but summer is still going strong. What to read next, I wonder?