Reading Updates

So just what have I been doing instead of blogging?  Working fairly hard.  Going to a lot of theatre (most quite good) and several concerts (ditto).  I'm actually seeing Kronos Quartet for the second time this week, at a concert that was rescheduled twice already due to Covid!  I have been trying to do background research for an article, but that has been sidelined.  While I was late both times, I was able to get two book reviews turned in to the Journal of Urban Affairs, and indeed I have one more review to work on (for a book on the Covid impacts on transportation actually).  Given that I am winding down my biking around own (as winter kicks in), I am ramping up my reading on trains.  

Over the past few months, I read Penelope Fitzgerald's Innocence, which I didn't think was particularly good (it's sort of like a Natalia Ginzburg novel, though not as good, with English interlopers popping up every now and again).

I slogged my way through Beckett's Three Novels, not enjoying them in the slightest...

Kingsley Amis The Alteration.  While I liked the boys' after hours discussions in their dormitory, most of this alternative history novel (that was mostly concerned with the morality of castrating boys to keep their singing voices pure) left me very cold, particularly the ironic twists at the end.  I'm finding I just don't rate Amis very highly as a writer, as there always seems to be a current of misogyny running under the surface of his books.  I do have a few more books do work through fairly soon, but if I feel the same way about them then I will take his remaining works off my list.

I was able to reread Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.  I'm fairly sure I liked it a bit better this time around (than when I was in my 20s), which is the opposite of how I found Midnight's Children, feeling it was over-stuffed and maybe a bit too didactic or perhaps programmatic (i.e. what happened to this boy represents this moment in Indian history and what happened to this girl represent this).  I probably should dig out Shame and see how I feel about that on the second read through.  My suspicion is it has held up well.  Anyway, I thought Rushdie had at least one too many side plots in The Satanic Verses.  I didn't think the bit about the trek to the Arabian Sea really added that much to the overall novel.  I thought the final confrontation between the two main characters wasn't really dramatic enough and didn't conclude satisfactorily.  But a lot of the episodes along the way, esp. in contemporary London, were enjoyable.  While I suspect he would have been in trouble with the religious authorities no matter what once he suggested that it was incredibly convenient that the divine messages that Mohammed was receiving aligned with his personal interests, it surely was section focused on a team of prostitutes adopting the names of Mohammed's many wives that really sealed his fate.

I went ahead and reviewed Mandel's Station Eleven (last summer actually) and liked it a lot (making my best of 2022 list), though I think it was just as well I held off for a while.  It just hit too close to home in 2020...

I also liked Conrad's The Secret Agent.  I guess it did appear slightly before Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  Maybe something was in the air with several authors adding anarchists to their rota of stock characters.  I don't happen to have this edition with the Edward Gorey cover, but it's pretty rad.

I will say Conrad surprised me with a few of the twists toward the end of the novel.  The Secret Agent isn't usually discussed as an influence on Arlt's The Seven Madmen, but I thought there was at least an affinity between the two novels.

I did not like DeLillo's Cosmopolis at all, as the main character, Eric, is a pretty loathsome specimen of the 1% (here a billionaire hedge fund manager who seems to be losing his mind as his play against the yen starts unraveling).  Anyway, he makes a number of questionable and generally immoral decisions as the novel progresses.  It is a quick read, but that still isn't enough to recommend it (and I think I'll skip the movie version that Cronenberg directed).  However, I was amused that DeLillo sneaks in a homage to Bellow's Seize the Day (also a book about one day in the life of a Manhattanite).  In fact, Cosmopolis could be read as an inversion of Seize the Day (and if no one has used this as the thesis of a paper or article, I offer it up freely).  Then Eric stumbles across the funeral of a musician he reveres and he loses it, weeping and carrying on, much like Tommy does in Seize the Day, though in Seize the Day, Tommy is really crying for himself; Eric's tears are more ambiguous in Cosmopolis.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy was pretty bleak,* especially the last two sections.  I definitely preferred the first third, which contained some terrible events but didn't dwell on them.  In contrast, the last sections focused on the never-ending conflict in Kashmir.  In general, the Ministry of Utmost Happiness veered dangerously close to the category of torture porn. It is somewhat interesting that 9/11 is almost a blip to these characters. The aftermath of the train fire (and riot) in Gujarat impacts several characters more, though it still is treated mostly off-screen, as it were. I gather A Burning by Megha Majumdar is not based on this tragedy (as I had assumed) but is more of a fictional composite. I've been thinking of reading A Burning and will move it up a bit on my list, so I might get to it in late 2023.

At some point, I decided I should read some Ukrainian literature and naturally turned to Andrey Kurkov.  Kurkov is best known for Death and the Penguin and the sequel Penguin Lost, which I read a while back. I found The Milkman in the Night quite interesting and surprisingly more upbeat than Death and the Penguin.  In fact, the ratio of happy to unhappy endings (for the 10 or so main characters) was suspiciously high.  One might almost say Kurkov had mellowed out.... This was one of the better novels I read in 2022.  For some reason I thought there were some hidden parallels between this and Bulgakov's** The Master and Margarita (mostly because of the prominent position of cats in each), but it's perhaps too much of a stretch.

Kurkov has found himself a bit of a roving spokesperson for an independent Ukraine since the Russian invasion.  I think I'll read his novella, A Matter of Life and Death, relatively soon and Grey Bees some time next year.

I'm not quite finished with Elizabeth Taylor's Blaming, but I should wrap that up over the weekend. It's her final novel, and she knew she was dying, pushing herself to correct the proofs, despite being so sick.  It's basically about a widow who doesn't quite know how to handle an acquaintance who keeps imposing on her grief.  I'm not that crazy about any of the characters, but it's also a short novel.  So far the only Taylor novel I liked with few or no reservations is A View of the Harbour, but she has at least eight other novels and a thick volume of short stories I have yet to read, and I hope to find they are more to my taste. 

Just a short while back I was able to trade in stack of CDs, and one of the books I got in trade was Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees.  I got this primarily because Canadian Stage is putting on an adaptation of the novel.  However, we are introduced right away to a poor but plucky youth in rural Novia Scotia who learns to become a piano tuner, but then a few pages later marries a child bride (13 - ick!) and then starts getting abusive when she doesn't keep house well or can't seem to cope with their new baby (double ick!).  First, I feel a bit whipsawed by how MacDonald is toying with the readers' sympathies, but more to the point I am just not in the mood to deal with all this family trauma.  I'm going to pass on seeing the play (and go to a concert instead) and put the book away in the basement for at least 5 years before I decide whether to give it another shot.   

Now I'm actually fairly close to wrapping up one reading list with only 6 books left, though 3 of them are actually a trilogy, which I find somewhat daunting.  I'm not sure I have ever completely closed out a list, so that will be exciting when it happens.  I have further to go on this list, but I'm making decent progress, getting through the books at a reasonable clip.

So what is next in terms of my short-term to medium-term reading?

I think it looks like this:

Bissoondath A Casual Brutality
Kurkov A Matter of Life and Death
JG Farrell Troubles
Baker A Fine Madness
JG Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur
Al-Aswany The Yacoubian Building 
JG Farrell The Singapore Grip
Vanderhaege Homesick
Kingsley Amis Take a Girl Like You 
Gallant Home Truths & Varieties of Exile
Mansfield Selected Short Stories & The Garden Party
Bellow The Adventures of Augie March
Desani All About H. Hatterr
Narayan The Man-Eater of Malgudi
Copeland Hey Nostradamus!
Hamsun Mysteries
Gogol Dead Souls
Shields Larry's Party
Malraux Man's Fate
Fontane Effi Briest
Flaubert Madame Bovary
West Miss Lonely Hearts & The Day of the Locust
Saramago Blindness
Maugham Cakes & Ale
Waugh Decline and Fall
Kurkov Grey Bees
Carter Wise Children
Austen Mansfield Park
Maxwell The Chateau
Reuss Horace Afoot & Henry of Atlantic City
Percy The Moviegoer 
Munro Open Secrets
Clark Blais This Time, That Place: Selected Stories
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Mary McCarthy The Group
Pym Excellent Women
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Koestler Darkness at Noon

Then there are 3 or so non-fiction books I am reading, including the transportation and Covid one, and to add some philosophy to the list also On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

In terms of stretch goals, I would really like to get back on the path of reading a Dickens novel each year, and I will try to get through Oliver Twist and also Dombey & Son (only slightly out of order and with the additional benefit of being about the impact of the railways on English life!) in 2023.

I might consider rereading Rushdie's Shame next spring/summer, as well as Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which is even shorter.

I'm also toying with the idea of rereading DeLillio's White Noise.  I found that it didn't make as much of an impression on me the 2nd time through back in 2018 (at least beyond the toxic airborne cloud and the general dread of death).  I just saw the movie, and I thought they had added all these crazy plot twists at the end, but then I went and looked and they are right there in the novel!  How embarrassing!  Now they did remove all mentions of the son's friend and gave the father-in-law's lines to a professor buddy and did a bit of restructuring, but basically it was all there and I simply forgot.  (Taking too much Dylar, I suppose...)  Also, the highway scene that closes the book was cut in favor of an extended music credit sequence set in the supermarket (to drive home the point that rampant consumerism helps us avoid thinking about death).  Overall, I thought it was well-done, and I'll probably watch it again when it starts streaming on Netflix in late Dec.  If I do reread White Noise in 2023 or 2024, I think the movie will really help me lock in the plot this time around.

This will probably realistically take me through the late summer or fall.  In terms of a major doorstopper to add to the list, it would be great to read Atwood's Maddadam Trilogy or Fante's Bandini Quartet or even reread Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  One can always dream...

P.S. Even though I am likely to read 13 books by Canadian authors, especially if I count poetry, I just don't think I am going to sign up for the Canadian challenge again.  Just not really feeling enough motivation, or frankly interest, in doing that many reviews, but I'll still post on books that I find worthy, Canadian or not.

*  It won't quite make the top 5 bleakest books, but probably would make the extended list of 10, at least until it is pushed to the side by Victor Serge's work.

** I only found out recently that Bulgakov was from Kyiv, though he was culturally Russian.  There is an on-going movement to "pause" (not cancel) Bulgakov and Tchaikovsky while the war rages on.  I don't have an issue with pausing Tchaikovsky, but Bulgakov, like Shostakovich, was almost always in disrepute with Stalin and probably would have been a dissenter against Putin's actions (though how openly is itself an open question).  However, it turns out apparently Bulgakov was in fact a bit of a Russian nationalist, which is awkward indeed for his defenders...  Maybe it is just as well that I reread The Master and Margarita in 2021 (for the third time actually or maybe fourth since I read two different translations back-to-back back around 2011 or 2012) before everything became so dire in Kyiv and eastern Ukraine.

 

Edit (05/15): I feel more than a bit of satisfaction that Glenn Sumi's review was anything but a rave.  He basically came out and said if you didn't absolutely love the novel, then this was a very poor use of 6 hours of one's life.