As anticipated, I am certainly reading less now that I am almost never on transit. The spring was mostly taken up with Nabokov (Ada and then Transparent Things). On a trip out to Halifax, I started Dickens's American Notes (and made sure to read the parts where he lands in Halifax (and might well have been in a ship wreck, which would have really shaken up British literature) and later on travelled up to Toronto and Montreal!) though it took me a while to finish it up. I also decided to abandon Hulme's The Bone People.
I then read Steinbeck's Cannery Row (and am reserving Sweet Thursday for the fall). For Book Club, I read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in a single day!). I made it through Thammavongsa's story collection How to Pronounce Knife fairly quickly. I was going to read her short novel Pick a Colour, but we are reading that for Book Club in the fall, so I might as well read it later, so it will be fresh. I was struggling with Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, finding it so slow and repetitive and also quite intentionally obscure. I finally abandoned it. Given that I abandoned another Dorfman book (about an obnoxious bike messenger!), and I have zero interest in ever watching or reading Death and the Maiden, it's safe to say he just isn't for me. I am more interested than ever in rereading Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, really hoping that it still holds up for me.
I read quite a few poetry collections in May and June, mostly by Jennifer LoveGrove and Laurie Graham (Rove and Settler Education and Calling It Back to Me), finding that I liked LoveGrove's first and second collections (The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Have Never Have Fired the Sentinel) a bit better than her later ones, though I did like The Tinder Sonnets a bit more than I expected, and I would have been ok picking up a copy at the Tranzac reading (if she had had a square on her). I didn't care much for Joshua Weiner's The World's Room, though there was a poem at the end about air travel that I might chuck into the travel anthology. Also, there was a pretty good poem (or section of a poem) about a shipwreck in Gbenga Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea.
I also read a lot of graphic novels (the entire Giant Days series), severely cutting into my normal reading time. And of course, Fringe took up almost all the remaining time.
At any rate, I somehow ended up with a copy of The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai from the library. I think I am somewhat intrigued by his War & War, but this was easier to request. It turns out that I brought it along with me on the trip to Stratford. I also was midway through Offill's Weather, and I also brought along Barry Kennedy's All That Monk Business, which is a quirky novel set in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. It does have a cool cover. I can't remember where I picked this up, though most likely either at a Little Free Library or a library book sale.
I alternated through all three books on the bus ride in and when we had some downtime between the plays. I finished Weather first. It is a very fast read, with short paragraphs outlining this woman and how she lets caring for her f'ed up brother overwhelm her life to the point where her husband takes off for a while with their child. There is also a lot of discussion on how to keep moving forward when the future seems somewhat pointless, i.e. the climate crisis will wipe out civilization. Definitely a novel that is in tune with the gesalt. I'll probably get around to reading her Department of Speculation, which is an earlier novel in the same vein.
I made a big dent in The World Goes On, finishing it a few days after we got back. I didn't like this much at all, and I probably would have dropped it, except I didn't have lots of other options on the bus(!), and I had so recently dropped the Dorfman. I will borrow War & War later to see if it lives up to the hype, but will not give it nearly as much of a chance.
I'm sort of torn on All That Monk Business. I don't care much for the main character, Buddy Monk, and I don't really find any of the characters plausible. It's taken 100 pages (a third of the novel) to finally come to the point where Monk's father's will is revealed. It's not clear if this is going to set off a frantic hunt a la It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or go in an entirely different direction. I'm mostly plugging along because it does remind me of my time in Vancouver, not that I spent much time at all on Hastings when I could avoid it.
I am very close to wrapping up Coupland's Microserfs, and the current plan it to bring it along next weekend and give it to my brother, who is in the tech industry. And I am probably going to finish Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets in a day or two. I'm glad that this isn't another repeat of Swami and His Friends in the sense that the boy who decides to abandon his studies carves out another path, but I'm not liking this as much as some of his earlier novels.
The current plan for next weekend is to bring along Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us and Chandler Klang Smith's The Sky Is Yours, both of which I should be able to leave behind, assuming I get through them on the trip.
After this, it will probably be Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (having borrowed this from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Amis's The Information. Oh, and very likely rereading The Odyssey, almost certainly sticking with Lattimore.
In the late fall/winter, I am considering Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.
As ever, simply too much to read and not enough time...
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