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?

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

Going on holidays has killed my blog momentum (and trying to read postmodernist Mexican literature (at least, that's what I think it is) that isn't really to my taste has killed my reading momentum).

I will say though, that these are my favourite non-fiction books, and Franzen is probably my favourite non-fiction writer.



[Charles] Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make.

There is such tenderness to his writing, and clarity, even when he writes about his own doubt or guilt or failure to understand. It has been a while since I read How to be Alone but his essays on the Chicago post office and reading William Gaddis (a novelist who I am sure I will never actually be capable of reading) are still vivid in my mind.

Read these books, they will make you feel good about having a brain.