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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Reading list



I have a confession. I don't read novels much anymore.

If my thirty-year-old self could hear me saying that, he'd kill himself. Novels, up until recently, were a vital part of my reading diet. I actually learned things from them. The really good ones are well-written too; you can actually read a sentence aloud without embarrassment. (All together now: “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .”)

But novels tire me now. One more saga of failed marriage, one more Bildungsroman, one more academic mocking Academia. And they go on, and on, and on.

I'm talking about Novel Novels, you understand: the things they review in the New York Times, the big chunky things you talk about with your friends at the Explorer's Club. I still feed on a steady diet of Other Stuff, as do we all: for me, it's biography (especially autobiography and letters), diaries, popular science, spirituality (go ahead, mock me!), history, and cultural stuff. And young-adult fiction, which for me fills the need that some people fill with crime novels or science-fiction novels. As Alice noted very astutely, books should have pictures and conversations.

But we're talking about Novel Novels.

Here's what I've read over the couple of months:

English, August. Upamanyu Chatterjee. Okay, this wasn't bad. It's set in modern India, about a guy taking a civil-service job in a city he hates. It's funny, and the depiction of Indian life is interesting. But he repeats himself too much: too many trips back and forth from the office to the hotel, too many long digressions. I know it's supposed to depict the main character's boredom, but all it did was stimulate my own boredom. I put it down about two-thirds of the way through, but I still remember a couple of the scenes vividly, so I'll probably go back and finish it one of these days.

The Towers of Trebizond. Rose Macauley. A reread. A laugh and cry book. “All camels are insane, but this one is more insane than most.” I think, when I die, I want a copy of this book in the coffin with me.

Against the Day and Inherent Vice. Thomas Pynchon. I feel about Thomas Pynchon the way you feel about someone who saved your life. I love him, and I will buy every book he writes, and I will tote it around with me, even if (like “Against the Day”) it weighs eighty pounds. But I will never finish “Against the Day.” It's too scattered, and I'm not sure what he's getting at (I even tried annotating it, as if it were “Finnegans Wake,” to no avail). “Inherent Vice,” on the other hand, had some good stuff in it, and a little hint of “Crying of Lot 49,” and one of those almost-happy endings that Pynchon does very well. (Most of his endings are pretty dark; when he ends something on a positive note, it's a good day.)

The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O'Connor. Another reread. Vicious, evil, funny. I picked it up, and I had to finish it, I couldn't stop. Can you think of a better name for a character than “Tarwater”?

What's For Dinner? James Schuyler. I'd never heard of it. I took a chance on it, and it paid off. Funny, dry, unsentimental, and unexpected. Worth reading.

The Western Lands. William Burroughs. I wish I were William Burroughs. I have a copy of his last diaries; he cried for days when his cats died. His books are dark and self-consciously perverse, but I love them anyway, because he was a good writer, dammit.

The Summer Before the Dark. Doris Lessing. She throws words at you like lawn darts, and her sentences are long and clumsy. But her books are amazing. The plots don't matter; people come and go, things generally go downhill, oh well, that's life. But the people – ah. Remember what I said about actually learning things from novels? I learned something from this one. I coudn't tell you what it was, but I did. Haunting.

Okay. So maybe Novel Novels are okay after all. I just get a sinking feeling sometimes when I walk through the Fiction section in the bookstore, that I'm letting the team down. But I guess we're okay for now.

And what have you been reading lately?



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