Reading Updates

There are so many things on my mind, but I'll start small and perhaps catch up on a few other things over the holidays.  I ended up reading The Lonely Londoners in a couple of days, as I was kind of hoping it would make my best of 2021 list.  While it had some interesting moments, the fact that it was written in West Indian dialect and the men treated women absolutely horribly (mostly their long-suffering wives and girlfriends, often left back home, but also the English women they were always chasing after).  It really felt like looking into an alternative universe where women's liberation never happened and feminism essentially didn't exist.  While Selvon lets up a bit on this theme in his later books,* there is still so much chauvinism going on.  I couldn't really relate to any of the characters, and in that sense I found this a quite inferior work to Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.  That said, I haven't reread that book since my 20s, and I might be just as unforgiving of it.

I was briefly reading Anita Desai's Feasting, Fasting, but I couldn't stand any of the characters, and it was just so boring.  I gave up fairly early on.  What amazes me is that this was considered the runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1999.  While there is a wide variety of reviews on Goodreads, the 2-star reviews (that said the characterization and plot gets even worse when Arun, the spoiled only son, lands in America) convinced me that abandoning the novel was the right decision.  (However, after perusing the plot of Coetzee's Disgrace, the actual winner in 1999, this sounds like another novel I want to avoid at all costs...)

So I am back to The Horse's Mouth.  I also don't really like these characters very much, and in particular I am fed up with Jimson.  It seems he has literally no self-control and is constantly ending up in jail because he threatens former friends and patrons, steals incessantly, breaks windows, etc.  Some people like these cheeky anti-heroes, but I can't stand them.  The only characters that I recall detesting more are Harriet from After Claude and Mickey Sabbath from Roth's Sabbath's Theater, which I definitely should have dropped.  I think the only reason I haven't dropped The Horse's Mouth is that this sits on a bunch of top 100 novel lists, which is a terrible excuse for sure.  I probably will wrestle it down to only 100 more pages by tonight, and then maybe I will be done by the weekend and I can toss it away.

Almost all the books and other presents have made it here, which is great, though I am still waiting on Crime and Punishment to show up from the UK.  That's the next major thing I expect to read, though I do have a lot of poetry to go through and perhaps the rest of Selvon's Moses Trilogy, even though I don't have particularly high hopes for it.  Maybe I'll only have two books on my best of 2021 list.  It has been such a disappointing year in so many ways that is probably appropriate...  Alternatively, I guess I could move Dempster's The Outside World up, though it wouldn't have made the final cut in most years.

* Perhaps only in The Housing Lark does it get muted.  The out-and-out sexism of Moses Ascending is even worse than in The Lonely Londoners to the point I can't imagine this showing up on a university reading list for example.