Mixing in Newer Titles

Looking over my current reading list, there are a handful of contemporary novels: Brewer's The Red Arrow, Rushdie's Victory City and Zalika Reid-Benta's River Mumma.  Arguably, one could contend that Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Suárez's Havana Year Zero fall in this category, despite being published 10 years ago.  Knocking at the door but not on the list proper are Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and Do You Remember Being Born?* by Sean Michaels.

In terms of what I am actually currently reading, I'm just over halfway through The Red Arrow.  There are parts I liked a lot, particularly any of the digressions about West Virginia, but the main plot (about an author whose crippling depression left him unable to write) is not very interesting to me.  Maybe it suffers in comparison to Bright Lights, Big City, which I just reread a few weeks back.  Also, the way that everything will be resolved by taking therapeutic doses of psilocybin mushrooms seems like a cop-out, even though this is based on the author's actual experience.  I came very close to bailing, though it has picked up a bit in the 2nd half and it is a relatively short novel, so I'll press on a bit longer.

I have roughly 80 pages left in Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers and 100 pages to go in Conrad's Under Western Eyes, which is good but not as compelling as The Secret Agent in my view.  I'll likely finish both of these by the middle of next week.

The big question is how much I'll be derailed by the new books I saw at the library.  (The website is still totally jacked up, but it is possible to borrow books on display, many of which are newer titles...)  Since books aren't really going to be due until Jan. at the earliest, I borrowed The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (from 2016) and How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, which was published in 2022.

I'm still pretty intrigued by The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, and it turns out there is another novel about female pirates/buccaneers: Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig, though I have to say these look more like summer reading.

I also ran across A Hero of Our Time by Naben Ruthnum, which sounds interesting as well, though if I do read it, I would want to read the Russian novel of the same title by Lermontov first.  And indeed, I would probably also read Oblomov at the same time.  I'd say, leaving War and Peace aside, A Hero of Our Times and Oblomov are two of the key remaining gaps off of my pre-Soviet Russian reading list.  And if I am reading Oblomov, I'd probably also finally read A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, which predates Oblomov.  (You can see how things spiral out of control once I get started...)

Then I just read that there is a new movie, American Fiction, hitting the street next week.  This is based off of Percival Everett's Erasure.  Both the novel and the movie sound like a pretty blistering take on the state of publishing and how "writers of colour" will do well only if they pretend to be homeboys (or gals) from the hood.  As much as I'd like to read the novel first, that just seems unlikely, particularly given that the TPL website still makes it impossible to locate specific books!  Maybe I should cut myself some slack and watch the movie first and read the novel afterwards if it seems worthy.

Finally, I only learned the other day that Paul Auster has a new novel out (Baumgartner) and, even more surprisingly, Tim O'Brien has just published his first novel in over 20 years: America Fantastica.  Apparently, this is a bit of a road trip novel, and in my mind maybe it could/should be paired with Rushdie's Quichotte.  Fortuitously, an advance reading copy of America Fantastica leaded in a Little Free Library box, so I scooped it up.  Now one path would be to reread all the classic O'Brien's (as well as The Atomic Age, which is supposedly not nearly as good), but the more tempting path is to jump to America Fantastica, since it is hot off the press.  I don't think I can justify rereading Quichotte, as I read it in 2020, but just possibly I might listen to the audiobook version.  However, it turns out this is 16 hours long, which does seem a bit excessive!  I guess it depends if I can figure out how to listen on my phone.  Or maybe I could listen while working on this jigsaw puzzle that I can never seem to find the time to work on.

At any rate, it is pretty clear I don't have the discipline to stick to a single reading list, but I do read across a pretty wide range of literatures -- and, in the meantime, I do make incremental progress on the current list.

* This novel about the impact of A.I. on artists & writers will be paired with Jeanette Winterson's 12 Bytes, which is actually a book of essays about A.I.