Nov. book news

I guess I am jumping the gun just slightly, but I am already looking ahead.

One of the annoying things about getting busy (and now having to deal with kittens and their needs on a daily basis) is that I do let some things get away from me.  I never did make it over to the Trinity book sale, though honestly I just don't need more books at the moment!  I guess Art Toronto was last weekend, and I didn't do that either.  Maybe I would have if I hadn't been off in Stratford on Saturday.

I finally managed to make it through Woolf's Orlando.  It was fine, but I don't think it is as strong a novel as Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.  I don't really expect to read it for a third time, so I did put it out front.  (No takers so far...)  I decided to try to get through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw by Halloween.  It will be a close thing, but I think I'll make it.  Now whether I will make it through Mrs. Dalloway by Nov. 5 (when I am attending this TPL celebration of Mrs. Dalloway) is definitely in question.  It certainly means that Empire Falls keeps getting pushed off.

Also for Nov., I should try to get to Miéville's The City and the City, as this is being read in a book club at work.  It turns out that all the TPL copies are on hold already, so I may need to get it through Robarts.  But since I can only keep it for two weeks, I might as well wait until I am actually ready to read the book straight through, so probably the second week of Nov.  After this, I need to try to wrap up Empire Falls and Canetti's Auto da Fe and then I'll see about reading Austen's Persuasion before the Austen anniversary celebrations in Dec.  If I get through this, then really the only Austen left to read will be Emma, and I might see about putting that on the list for 2027.  (Interestingly, Prunella Scales narrated an abridged and unabridged version of Emma that was very well received, though you have to buy the unabridged version on cassette(!) or CD.  I am toying with the idea of ordering a copy and putting it aside until I have actually read Emma first.)  

I decided just to buy Shteyngart's Vera and have him sign it (at his Dec. TPL event) rather than trying to read it in advance, particularly as this is a case where one really ought to read Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor first!  That was never going to happen.  I had thought I owned a copy of Ada, but it turns out that I don't, so I started hunting a copy down.  I went to the BWV near the Eaton Centre, but they didn't have it.  On my last outing to Tafelmusik, I had time to duck into Seekers Books.  They didn't have it either, unfortunately.  The BWV on Bloor did have one copy, so I snatched that up, then went off to hear a terrific concert, mostly of Vivaldi and some of his contemporaries.  I don't have a specific time-line, but I would like to try to get to Ada in early 2026 (and maybe my next trip up to Ottawa on Jan. 20 is a good opportunity to at least start the novel), and then read Vera at some point after that.  If I am successful in following through with this, maybe I should put Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy in the 2nd half of 2026, and slot War and Peace and Lessing's Children of Violence cycle (and Emma) into 2027.

One very long novel (700 pages) that I think I will just skip is Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.  I just saw her at a TIFA event, and they were talking about her novel and the long, long journey to get it finished (20 years in the writing!).  I think partly I was stressed over my tight schedule, and the fact they had a meltdown and couldn't actually sell any copies of her new book, and they started late (with a somewhat insulting explanation that they were having sardines on toast and lost track of time), but there really isn't anything that she said that makes me want to read this novel.  I mean never say never, but I have literally 500+ books I want to read ahead of this, including rereading The Inheritance of Loss, which is a terrific novel.  I had pretty much given up on getting any books signed (since I had a concert to go to that started at 7), but even though they started late, they ended at 6:31, and I somehow managed to get in line towards the front (probably in the first 10 people).  She signed my copy of Inheritance, and I scampered off and made it to the concert after all.*  (I suspect that had I paid the hefty sum for Loneliness and thus had more skin in the game, I would have been halfway back in the (very long) line and would have bailed in the end.)

The last thing I wanted to touch on before I run off, is that I just wasn't paying enough attention, and a bunch of holds I had at TPL simply expired, as I usually put them on inactive status for long periods of time.  I guess this means I should just use the save function rather than trying to put them on suspended hold.  This is pretty annoying, and I am trying to recall just what was on there.  Over the past few months, I had whittled the list down a fair bit.  I DNR Ghosted after I found out what a morally bankrupt book it was.  I ditched holds for Vera and Pick a Colour, as I will end up buying those books.  I ended up getting a copy of Do You Remember Being Born? which is about a older poet (based on Marianne Moore) interfacing with an AI agent that needs to be trained in understanding language.  So this is one I need to try to finish up between Mrs. Dalloway and The City and the City, but at least I have it in hand and won't just forget about it.  There were a few still on hold where the expiration date was far enough away.  This includes Aliens on the Moon by Thomas King and You've Changed by Ian Williams** and Murakami's latest.  I remember I had one book about architecture on hold, but I am not as interested in that at the moment.  I was able to reconstruct most of the list that evaporated:
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Chakraborty
The Pleasures of Exile by George Lamming
What We See in the Smoke by Ben Ghan
The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham

(The last one was particularly hard to find as it is a south Asian novel, not an Arabic one!  And I kept thinking it was called Lost Man or something like that.  I wasn't terribly far off, but it took a while to turn it up again.)

I think in general, I will try to get through this list in 2026, as most of the books are not all that long, and not risk this happening again.  I am sure there are a few books that I am not remembering, but these were the ones that came to mind right away and thus am apparently the most interested in actually reading (one day).

Edit (8/31): I did finish The Turn of the Screw and thought the ending was poor. 😞    I'm not a huge fan of unreliable narrators in general, though these sorts of books can be amusing, depending on how the author tips off the reader.  What I don't care for, and The Turn of the Screw has in spades, is stories that are full of radical ambiguity.  James apparently wants the reader to vacillate between thinking there is a realistic and a supernatural ending to the story.  I just don't like that at all.  Period.

 

* It certainly helped that the TIFA event was at Victoria College and the ARC Ensemble concert was practically around the corner at Mazolleni Hall, but it was still pretty stressful, worrying if I would be late.  The ARC Ensemble concert was very good, though of the 3 composers they featured, Frederick Block's pieces were clearly the strongest of the bunch.

** I keep getting blocked from seeing Ian Williams.  Last year when he was giving the Massey Lecture in Toronto, I had a ticket but had to travel for work so sent a friend in my place (and did get a couple of books signed at least).  Right after Kiran Desai (and at the same time as the ARC Ensemble!), Ian Williams was at TIFA talking about his new novel, so I missed that.  There was another recent event in Toronto where he was featuring his new novel, but I was off to see Bremen Town that evening and just didn't feel up to trying to switch the ticket.