December Books

I forgot to mention that I just finished Kuprin's The Duel.  This is part of Melville House's Art of the Novella series and is actually the longest of 5 works on dueling. Kuprin dwells on the pointlessness of dueling, but generally makes army life in a backwater army post seem boring and indeed pointless.  There is a restlessness among the officers that leads to excessive drinking, gambling (and cheating at cards) and cheating on spouses, which in turn often leads to dueling.  While the officers in The Duel are all too present in each others' affairs, they mostly seem to feel they would be better off at war.  This desire to see action (and feeling that military life is otherwise pointless) is also a major theme running through Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe), though the main character feels far more isolated than these Russians.  It appears I read this in 2016 or so.  Given that The Tartar Steppe is a fairly short work, I may revisit it one of these days.

I got only a few pages into Julia Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium before giving up on it.  There's such a fine line between parodying a bad thriller novel and simply being a bad thriller, and she crashed through it...

If I was still reviewing for the Canadian Challenge, Bissoondath's A Casual Brutality would be a good pick.  It's about a doctor from a tiny Caribbean island who went off to Toronto to learn medicine (and escape his fate of running the family store!).  He marries a Canadian woman who decides to move back home with him.  She does not adjust well to island life.  I've just hit the moment where she demands that she be sent back to Canada with their young son.  I'm not quite sure where the novel is headed, though frankly the doctor is a fool to stay on the island as it seems to be headed towards lapsing into chaos, followed by military rule.

That's pretty much where I am at with the reading.  I will likely get through the Bissoondath, Kurkov's A Matter of Life and Death, J.G. Farrell's Troubles and perhaps will just have time to start Baker's A Fine Madness before the month is out.  I should also get started on this volume on the transportation impacts of Covid that I agreed to review for the Journal of Urban Affairs.

Edit: Well, I am dipping my toes into The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany.  It has a large cast of characters, so let's see if I can keep track of them all...  I see from the receipt that I picked this up at Powell's North in Chicago.  I miss that place.  I used to be able to walk to it from my condo and spent a fair chunk of change there...  Eventually they closed this store down and also the one in the South Loop, so only the mothership in Hyde Park is left.