More on Recent Reading

Microserfs was an odd book.  It definitely had some flashes of Coupland's later preoccupations with slogans and gnomic writings, but was filled with characters (all mostly interchangeable) and then a somewhat unearned swerve into melodrama to make the reader feel something.  I'm not sorry I read it, but it certainly isn't in my top half of his novels (I believe I've actually read 7 or perhaps 8 of his books, including a non-fictional book about Vancouver, City of Glass).

I was also taken a bit aback by the plot swerves in The Vendor of Sweets.  Towards the very end of the book, the main character goes back into the memory hole and spends a lot of time thinking about his wife in the early days of his marriage, and then he sort of leaves his adult son to his own devices to make his own path through life.  I wouldn't say it was a particularly satisfactory ending.  It did have the advantage of bringing the book to a rapid close.  Likewise with Microserfs, this is somewhere in the bottom half of Narayan's novels, though so much better than The Man-eater of Malgudi.

I've gotten to the halfway point of All That Monk Business, and there is a major plot twist.  It's intriguing enough to keep going.  However, I have diverted almost all my attention to The Odyssey right now, having just reached Book 5 where Odysseus finally enters the story!

So in terms of what I am actually reading at the moment, it is The Odyssey, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (borrowed from the library and it should pair well with The Odyssey) and wrapping up All That Monk Business.  I'm pretty sure that immediately after this, it will be The Library Cosmic by Ben Berman Ghan (also out from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile and Thien's The Book of Records.  I'm debating rereading Station Eleven for Book Club, but am not sure if I'll be able to find the time.

Given my interest in the Secret Life of Books podcast, and my general push to get to 20/20 from the top 100 books of all time, and my general interest in thinking about the books I need to read or reread before I kick the bucket, I've sort of drawn up this rudimentary list:

Jane Austen Emma
James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and as many essays as I can manage
Dickens David Copperfield (and maybe Great Expectations and/or Our Mutual Friend and rereading Bleak House)
Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Dostoevsky rereading The Brothers Karamazov
Fuentes Terra Nostra (and probably rereading Christopher Unborn)
Garcia Marquez rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera
Grossman Stalingrad and Life and Fate
Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure
Henry James Portrait of a Lady
Lessing rereading The Golden Notebook
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks
Morrison Song of Solomon and maybe Beloved
Nabokov Pale Fire
Rabelais rereading Gargantua and Pantagruel
Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
Tolstoy War and Peace
V. Woolf rereading To the Lighthouse and The Waves

Then a few series that are of interest, most notably Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Lessing's Children of Violence series, Faulkner's The Hamlet/The Town/The Mansion, Trollope's The Chronicles of Barsetshire and perhaps rereading Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

There are obviously still a few gaps here and there, particularly in terms of French and German literature, which I've never really focused on, but if I do manage to get through this list, I'll have read almost all the truly central books in the British and American canons, along with my many forays into Russian, Indian, South American and South African literature along the way.  It would have been a good (reading) life at any rate.