Late Feb. reading

I wrapped up Amis's' Girl, 20.  I have to admit, the ending was impressively bleak.  While I still find Douglas, the narrator, a pompous jerk (who feels that the kind of music he likes is objectively better than rock 'n roll*), in the end, this worked better for me than any other Kingsley Amis novel I've read, most of which I haven't cared for at all.  I suppose I'll hang onto his later novels for a bit longer, but I'm still keeping him on a short leash and would like to get him off my shelves fairly soon.  The intro from the NYRB edition suggested pairing this with Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.  That's a good idea, and I'll see if I can track my copy down and somehow slot it in.

Recently, I was writing about how I had a mysterious package to be picked up at the post office.  I wasn't sure if it was Salgado's Africa or the long-delayed The Siege of Krishnapur.  In the end, it was Salgado's Africa.  Better yet, I didn't have to pay any customs charge on it, which is often the case when things are held at the post office.

I had come fairly close to not ordering it because it had this cover:

instead of this one, which is so much more interesting:

Fortunately, I realized in time how silly that was.  A more serious objection is that probably 80-90% of the photos are in his earlier books, primarily Sahel, Migrations, Workers and Genesis.  Still, many of what I consider to be his greatest compositions are here.  Another major bonus is that the landscape orientation of this book means that they don't need to be split over two pages.  In the end, I mocked up a new dust jacket with the cover photo I really wanted, and I am quite happy with my purchase.

That still left the question of Farrell's Siege and whether it was just lost in the mail.  I wrote to the bookseller, and he said that Royal Mail had suffered a pretty major ransomware attack, plus was dealing with an ice storm, and that it was most likely still on its way, but just delayed.  I said I would check back in a couple of weeks before asking for a refund.  I also realized that while I still wanted this Folio Society edition, it was going to be too oversized to actually read on the train, so I'd need to check out a copy from the library anyway!  

A few days after that, I had some time to kill after the Mirvish show Things I Know to Be True (a fairly standard melodrama but with some very fine acting), so I started walking down Yonge.  I was a bit put out by the fact that this Indian restaurant didn't do any take out at all (really???), but then I spotted ABC Books across the road.  While the other bookstores on Yonge seem to have closed up, particularly Eliot's (and I still kind of kick myself for not going a few more times since I moved back in 2014 -- and missing the blow-out sale!), ABC Books seems to be going strong.  I picked up a couple of books that I'll read and then put out front (Copeland's Hey Nostradamus! and Heather O'Neill's Daydreams of Angels).  I took a quick look to see if they had The Siege of Krishnapur, and they did have it, and at a fairly good price!  So I scooped that up as well.  And then by the workings of ju-ju magic, the Folio Society copy showed up in the mail two days later.  One can pretty much guarantee that if I hadn't bought the back-up copy, the other one would still be lost in the mail...

Now for a quick tangent.  There has been a bit of chatter on whether we start a book club at work.  I think there is some desire to, but the limiting factor is that the manager who really wants to start one has very limited train service and basically can only stay late at work if she drives in, which isn't particularly sustainable (financially or environmentally).  So I don't know if it will truly get off the ground.  I figure that my pick would be one of the fairly new SF novels dealing with climate change, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards.  It's a picture of a fairly grim post-oil world, trying to envision a world without cheap energy.  There are certainly echoes of Blade Runner, but it is its own thing.  I think Bacigalupi pulls it off well, but there are certainly critics who say he is going overboard in exoticizing his setting and characters (shades of Said's Orientalism), or indeed that he doesn't have the right to write about non-Western characters (perhaps a minority position but one that sadly grows louder every year).  I'm finding it really quite absorbing, and read about one-third in one sitting.  I imagine I'll be done by Tuesday or Wednesday at this rate.  I'll probably still recommend it to the group, even with caveats, though I'm thinking there is less and less likelihood we actually do start up a reading group.  Anyway, this is a book I've sort of hoped to read for a long time, and now I finally am in the middle of it.  Other notable climate change fiction is Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, which I have sort of very tentatively pencilled in for the end of the year, and Joy Williams's Harrow, which I can probably squeeze in this summer.

Anyway, I think the next book after The Windup Girl has to be The Siege of Krishnapur, which isn't quite as long as I thought.  After that, it will be Baker's A Fine Madness and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (inspired by Reuss's Horace Afoot).  I probably should put The Moviegoer on hold after I am midway through Farrell's Siege, though there is a copy over at the Jones library, and maybe I can just walk over and grab it, which has a certain appeal.  Then I will wrap up Farrell's Empire Trilogy with The Singapore Grip, which is definitely a longer novel, but hopefully just as good as the rest of his work.  According to this list, I will then read a few Canadian novels (though I have pretty much given up reviewing them) and then reread Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.  All in all, in 2023 I am trying to read a lot of the really good books I've been meaning to but haven't gotten around to yet, so I believe this will be a pretty rewarding year of reading.

It keeps slipping my mind, but I really need to start in on Pandemic in the Metropolis, as I promised to send over my review in April.  I think I'll start in on it, as soon as I finish The Windup Girl, as there are a few thematic similarities.

* Not that I haven't felt the same way about monster truck rallies at the Silverdome-dome-dome or even the way the Superbowl is hyped all out of proportion, but I've also read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, so I realize this stems entirely from class prejudices, and even more importantly, high and low art can be flipped under the right circumstances.