Summer Reading - In Conclusion

Somehow, we've found ourselves in Autumn already and so technically, the days of Summer reading are over. As usually happens once the new year gets underway, my ability to stop and digest what I've been reading slips to the bottom of the mountain of tasks required for basic life maintenance. Nonetheless, I have still been reading, which is probably the most important thing (although does not in itself make for the most interesting blog posts). The last month in books, in summary:

John Brandon's first novel, Arkansas, landed in my lap as a result of a McSweeney's subscription program and I loved every page of it. His newest offering, Citrus County, is just as good. I challenge you to find a more cutting, deadpan writer!

 Another author whose first novel I adored - Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child is one of my favourite urban fantasy/magical realist novels (what are we calling that genre these days?). I was very excited to discover his not-so-new book, Angels of Destruction, a story about the past, and the line between the real, the imagined and longed for impossibilities. It pains me to say it, but it left me unsatisfied. The sophomore novel is a difficult beast.

Annnd there goes my literary credibility, if I ever had any. Let me say nothing more than that the outcome of this tangled web of angsty teenage lust was quite satisfactory!

The Irrelevant Complexity of David Foster Wallace

Wallace was youth and doubt, from the very first sentence he published to the last - Don DeLillo

This fantastic BBC radio documentary about David Foster Wallace popped up in my Twitter feed last week on DFW's birthday. If you're a fan at all, I highly recommend you have a listen. It includes interviews with Don DeLillo, Mark Costello, Ricky Moody, and a number of other interesting folks who have much to offer the conversation on DFW's life and work. Best of all, this documentary contains some excerpts of his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, which is coming out in April.

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?

Summer Reading #1 - Changing My Mind

I freely admit that I love Zadie Smith. She's smart, self-conscious, aggravating and one of the most careful and insightful readers I've come across. Smith has a level of engagement and understanding with what she reads that I envy – I suppose that, despite my affectations, I'm not an overly academic reader, and many of the allusions and sensibilities that she is able to detect and analyse are lost on me as a reader of fiction. As a reader of essays, though, and of her essays, I find myself crying, “Yes! EXACTLY!” on almost every page, even when she is writing about books I've never read.

Her essay on E.M. Forster, or more specifically her review of The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, is a good example of this. I read Howard's End a few years ago and have to confess that I took little pleasure from it, most likely because Forster's light touch went entirely over my head so I really had no idea what was happening most of the time but pressed on because I vainly hoped that it would become apparent at the end (or the End, as it were). It was frustrating and left me absolutely none the wiser about Forster as an author. Or, let's be honest, about Howard's End as a novel. Or as an End. Who was Howard, anyway? I have no idea. Obviously I am no great expert in this field, but Smith's gentle treatment of Forster's character, his oeuvre, and his approach to his work as a broadcaster makes me want to know more. It makes me wish that I could deduce such things from my own readings, and if I can't, then I would wish to have Zadie leaning over my shoulder at all times, quietly pointing out all the richness I'm unable to see for myself.

Her essay on Middlemarch, on the other hand, illuminates my existing feelings about that novel with far more clarity than I ever could:

One of the reasons we idolise the nineteenth-century English novel is the way its methods, aims and expression seem to beautifully integrated. Author, characters and reader are all striving in the same direction. Eliot, speaking of Dorothea's mind, describes the process this way: “The reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.” It is a fine description of what all good novelists try to do, after their own fashion.

The thing that I love most about Middlemarch, surely that all of its many appreciators love, is that it is the story of change in all its forms – personal, communal, physical, philosophical, and so on – the “reaching forward” that Dorothea describes. Eliot shows us that not all changes need to be grand in order to be significant, and the journey from innocence to experience, in whatever banal or extravagant form that may take, is common to us all. In a slight digression, this has reminded me that it is probably time for me to revisit Middlemarch. It doesn't feel like summer reading though, I think it is a novel more appropriate for the changing of seasons. Perhaps I'll save it for the autumn reading list, if I make one.

At other points, I become irritated with Changing My Mind in a way that I find hard to justify. Smith's film reviews, while surely at least a little tongue in cheek, are so grindingly superior in tone that I want to hurl the book across the room. The frustrating part being that, mostly, I agree with her – I haven't seen Date Movie but I suspect I, too, would be “repulsed by the children it is meant for and dread the adults they will become”. Without having seen it I don't doubt that it is utter crap, and yet all I can think is, “Am I that up myself?”

Perhaps I am, as the book is retrieved from the proverbial floor when Smith writes about some of her cinematic loves – Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. I'm back on board wholeheartedly when she has this to say about Werner Herzog and Grizzly Man:

Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches The Simpsons's hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamously egomaniacal auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It did not disappoint.)

The high point of the collection though, surely, is her essay on David Foster Wallace. Although I can claim to have endured/loved Infinite Jest, I can say with certainty that I have hardly skimmed the surface of what is really in that novel, not to mention the rest of DFW's work. He is a writer I love to read about - I suppose all DFW fans probably fetishise writing about his life and work, looking for answers and guidance, as Smith says, searching for the key to unlock the text. Really, in the end, that is what being a good reader of David Foster Wallace, and a good reader of any fiction, of life, is all about. Changing My Mind shows us what a good reader aspires to be. Smith would argue, though, that the key is always within the text. Read, and re-read, until you find it.

Summer Reading List

I won't be having much time off over summer, but making a summer reading list makes it feel a little more like a holiday. I'm trying to be good and chip away at the huge number of books I've bought but not yet read, so this list is put together more with a view to clearing shelves than to creating a cohesive reading program. But it's the holidays, so who really wants to worry about "cohesion" anyway?


From the overflowing shelves:

• The Passage - Justin Cronin
• Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays - Zadie Smith
• Perdido Street Station - China Miéville
• Citrus County - John Brandon
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
• Boneshaker - Cherie Priest
  

A few things I want to add to the collection over the holidays:

• Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
  
• Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
• Endangered Pleasures - Barbara Holland

Finally, a bit of re-reading:

• The Beach - Alex Garland (I loved this book as a teenager and I'm intrigued to find out if it is still my cup of tea)

I'm sure I'll receive a book or two for Christmas or stumble upon other things I'd like to read so I will allow myself a small amount of diverting from the list, but I'd like to stick to the plan as much as possible. Internet, hold me to it!