The Book Chill

One of the major downsides of this big chill is that I don't even pretend I am going to bike in.  It will warm up a bit next week (hopefully!), but I'm not quite sure how much.  If the forecast is accurate, then Wed., Fri. and next Sat. might all be potential biking weather, though I just hope we don't have slush on the streets, as I don't bike when it is at all cold and slippery.

Anyway, the silver lining, as it were, is that I am reading more on the TTC (to partly make up for cutting my gym time in half where I read while on the exercise bikes).  I managed to get through Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday.  I found myself less interested in it as it went on, since it is so digressive and there are no meaningful breaks at all in the text.  I guess it is marginally easier to follow the dialogue (than Saramago, whose writing style is even more off-putting) but that's only because pretty much the entire book is supposedly an incredibly long monologue by the title character, Austerlitz.  I looked ahead and Rings of Saturn has paragraph breaks at least!

I'm about 2/3rd through Maxwell's The Chateau and I should wrap this up reasonably soon.  There are very faint parallels with Troubles (a large number of people interacting at a guest house) but here the French characters are recovering from WWII rather than heading into the Irish uprising with the troubles still to come.  In some respects this is a very mild version of the Ugly American stereotype with an American couple coming to France and trying to soak up culture and learn the language but constantly getting crossed up in minor cross-cultural understandings.  Somewhere around the 200 page mark I kind of lost interest in this couple (who like all somewhat annoying and clueless tourists have overstayed their welcome) and wish the novel was much shorter.  I should be able to wrap this up in a few more days and then will launch into Mary McCarthy's The Group.  I expect this will be a bit more compelling, but one never knows.

Perhaps appropriately, given the weather, I am just about one-third of the way through Drabble's The Ice Age, which is set in the 70s when Britain seemed to turn inward and the economic forecast was rather bleak. Plus ça change...

When I am at the gym, I am reading Percival Everett's Half an Inch of Water, which is a book of short stories set out in the West, largely featuring Black and Native American characters.  So far the stories are exceeding my expectations.  (I'm not a big fan of "Westerns"...)

Not entirely sure what will be next this winter.  I will get to Pym's Excellent Women soon, but that is quite short and I already read it once, so it shan't take too long.  Probably Rushdie will be after that, and I just need to decide whether to let Victory City jump the queue over Fury.  Maybe O'Brien's America Fantastica, especially on the Buffalo bus trip, with East of Eden reserved for the Ottawa trip in late Feb.  I am hoping we are mostly out of the deep chill by then...