My reading has been somewhat spotty lately. And now with the current restrictions, I won't be on the train to work for weeks (and more likely months...) and the gym is closed as well, so I can't even read while on the stationary bike. So incredibly frustrating...
Anyway, in December I finally finished Joyce Cary's The Horses' Mouth, but I didn't care much for it. I'm not quite sure how I'll feel about the movie, though I suppose Alec Guinness will do his damnedest to make him a lovable rogue. I didn't realize until recently that Guinness really pushed for the movie to be made and even wrote the screenplay, adding a comic ending.
I also read 2/3rds of Selvon's Moses Trilogy. These are not deep novels, and I've already noted the casual sexism of The Lonely Londoners gets even worse in Moses Ascending. It wasn't until I dug into a bit more that I realized Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin is set entirely in the West Indies (which is the same for Selvon's first two novels), or rather I had simply forgotten this. It isn't until The Emigrants that we get to London. So I may go ahead and reread Castle, followed by Selvon's An Island is a World, followed by The Emigrants, and then I'll probably wrap up my quick spin through immigration literature with Selvon's Moses Migrating. Ideally by this time, I'll finally have word back from Immigration Canada that I am finally done with the immigration process. (I'll write about this process separately.)
I'm still waiting on my copy of Crime and Punishment to arrive. It should be here by now, but I'll wait another week or so before I put in a claim for a refund. As it happens, I do have a copy but it got somewhat water damaged on the trip to Ottawa last summer. When I do make my way though that, I'll probably reread Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and then tackle Arlt's The Seven Madmen. I haven't decided what should follow, but as far as the "high literary" through line, I've been meaning to read Conrad's The Secret Agent, Celine and Beckett's 3 Novels, and who knows, perhaps reread O'Brien's he Third Policeman. Those are all as worthy as anything else, and there are generally on the short side, as is everything I've discussed so far with the exception of Crime and Punishment.
I am trying to stick with my resolution to stop reading books that I don't like, though I did violate this principle with The Horse's Mouth. On the other hand, I was so turned off by Ballard's Concrete Island and the fact that the narrator immediately makes his own (extremely implausible) situation worse that I gave up in the middle of Chapter 3. I've read a bit of Ballard here and there, and for sure he's an acquired taste and not really what I am interested in right now. That said, so far The Day of Creation is a bit easier to swallow -- more like a Herzog film and less like a weird Cronenberg fable.*
One quick read was Tim O'Brien's July, July which is about he happenings at a 31st year college reunion. The shadow of The Big Chill hangs very heavy over this novel, and it doesn't quite do enough to justify its existence, but it was better than a lot of things I read in November and December.
One promising book that I picked up recently is Jean Giono's The Open Road, in a new English translation just published by NYRB. It details a road trip through the south of France by two characters who are supposed to be opposite types, though it isn't exactly a buddy film or the Odd Couple or anything like that. Anyway, I've just started it and am enjoying it so far, though I am wondering 1) whether it is worth trying to read it in French more or less simultaneously (as it written in a fairly plain style) and 2) whether I should actually read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men first, as that was a bit on an inspiration for Giono, along with Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The Steinbeck is quite short and it is one of his short novels I've never read, incredibly enough, so probably I should start there.
* Of course I wrote this and then not much later Ballard introduced a very prominent theme of pedophilia. I think the narrator was not ultimately successful in sleeping with the African teenager who was on his (pointless) mission to find the source of the river, though there was an odd fever dream sequence where reality was a bit warped, so it is hard to be sure. In any event, I could have and definitely should have dropped this book much sooner. Have to learn to trust those instincts
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